to rule the desert, by Monica Robinson

to rule the desert exists in a cloud of hazy, Southern Gothic air, shimmering with the uncertainty of mirage. Horror set in the unrelenting heat and landscape of the American Southwest desert pairs well with the uneasy, winding, speculative journey Robinson creates in the book’s narrative, centering two queer women in a roadtrip-gone-wrong story.

Following Quinn and Ava on a literal and metaphorical route between living, dead, and all that lies between, this story is full of quiet observers ferrying the characters along their journey. Their memories haunt them, but they also become the specters haunting their own memories. The reader, too, becomes a part of the story as a present observer through the layered experiences of the characters across the desert.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is, at its core, about the impermanence of our connections with one another, and the struggle to accept this in grief. While to rule the desert has recognizable motifs from the myth, Robinson turns the story into something new, not just in the queer identities of the two key players, but in the Southern Gothic setting, the narrative structure, and the exploration of themes of life and death, memory, and humanity.

Robinson explores the often-indefinable nature of human emotions through winding prose and generous subversions of structural and corporeal expectations: “... the desert held a vague awareness, impossible to put into words ...”

Experimental, haunting, and viscerally emotional, to rule the desert creates a world both familiar and strange, and every moment in this story will make you look twice.