It doesn’t take long for things to get dark in Kailee Pedersen’s debut horror novel, “Sacrificial Animals.” Dark and bone-chillingly bloody. The author pens a macabre hymn to violence, drawing inspiration from a variety of literary and mythological sources.
Early on, Pedersen writes in the tradition of a frontier “King Lear”: two sons vying for a petulant father’s affection and inheritance while he rages against the world. Think “Yellowstone,” but meaner, with a “glass-eyed buck’s head” guarding the gate. Jane Smiley fans, beware: Pedersen shows no mercy on these thousand acres, leaning into disturbing details and gore.
“Sacrificial Animals” begins at Stag’s Crossing, the expansive farm of Carlyle Morrow, a barbarous widower patriarch who rules the land, a herd of trap-mouthed greyhounds, his emotions and his two teenage sons with all the subtlety of an axe. In the opening pages of the story, Carlyle tears his boys out of bed in the middle of the night to hunt a mother fox who’s gotten into the chickens. He metes out his retribution upon her young in a heartless scene of cruelty and “wild omophagia,” forcing his sons’ complicity in their deaths in an attempt to impart his own cold inhumanity to the next generation.
In chapters alternating “Then” and “Now” Pedersen follows Carlyle’s tender youngest son, Nick, as he realizes he’ll never live up to his father’s rough ideal. Carlyle’s violence is “keen and beautiful as the s.