Horse Latitudes - by Morris Collins (Paperback)

About the Book

In the tradition of Joseph Conrad, Ethan, haunted by guilt in the wake of his wife's tortured descent into madness, loses himself in a lawless and sensual world beyond the US's southern border.

Book Synopsis

"When your life vanishes, how do you do anything but follow it?"

Haunted by guilt and reeling from his shattered marriage, New York photographer Ethan flees south to a Central American country on the brink of revolution. Ethan doesn't know if he's seeking redemption or punishment, but--one bad choice after another--he finds himself indebted to Yolanda, who gives him a chance, if anything she's saying is true, to find both.

Yolanda's sister is deep in the country's interior, waiting for a man named Soto--a slave trafficker posing as a migrant guide. The journey to find her plunges Ethan into a feverish world of demented expatriates, intelligence officers, mystics and lunatics, where loyalties are uncertain and ghosts unshakable.

A harrowing examination of post-colonial blight, Horse Latitudes is a lushly written tropical gothic--part thriller, part nightmarish journey into the corruption at the heart of US intervention in Central America--that peers into the world of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Neighborhood through the lens of Elliot Ackerman's Dark at the Crossing.

Review Quotes

One of the most impressive debuts I've read. A hybrid narrative that's part thriller, part surreal noir, and part tropical gothic, it reads like a collaboration between William Faulkner, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Hunter S. Thompson, as directed by David Lynch...Gripping and wildly entertaining.
-NPR

Vivid in the visual detail a photographer would gather, Collins' politically complex and psychologically intense tale demands the reader's complete submersion in a decaying world in which the lines between good and evil sway and vanish...Though the plot twists like that of a thriller and authentic characters keep the story moving, Collins' underlying theme of why choices are made and their consequences makes for a philosophically compelling read.
--Booklist

The writing is that kind where you feel like every word was placed by the writing gods rather than a fallible human...It takes a while to attach to this book, but if you can, the result is quite a meaningful reading experience.
-Book and Film Globe

Not since Gore Vidal's Dark Green, Bright Red have I read such a horrifying and politically astute novel. I could not put it down.
-Keep the Wisdom

A historically attuned novel for a world that has lost its way. ... Stumbling toward nightmare realizations, Horse Latitudes is a novel with the edge of the thriller and the bleak rawness of a documentary--feral, needful, and unapologetic about the dark underbellies it reveals.
-Foreword Reviews

Morris Collins' Horse Latitudes reads like a Graham Greene novel for the twenty-first century, reinventing the citizen abroad for a new global age, one where the quest for redemption and righteousness still rarely leads to clarity, only cloudier choices, unfair outcomes, darker ambiguities. Ambitious and striking, Horse Latitudes delivers, offering readers an adventurous moral thriller--and a truly powerful debut. --Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

About a quarter of the way through Horse Latitudes, a woman asks Ethan, the book's troubled protagonist, if he wants to die or if he's just an asshole? 'Ethan didn't see why it had to be one or the other, ' Morris Collins writes. And that was when I knew: this is the best debut novel of the year, hands down. Comparisons to Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry practically write themselves, but Horse Latitudes also calls to mind such modern noir greats as James Crumley and Kem Nunn. Ethan's story is a febrile journey into an unknown landscape, a table-side seat at a game of Russian roulette that has no winners. It's also erudite, funny and sexy as hell. --Rebecca Oppenheimer, Kramerbooks

"In the best tradition of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Morris Collins' Horse Latitudes is a remarkable debut novel, detailing one man's quest for redemption through a quixotic adventure in Central America, couched in brilliant, bold lyricism, flavored with heartbreak and danger. Fast-paced and hypnotic, it holds you in its spell and won't let go, leaving images like exotic souvenirs in its wake." --William J. Cobb, author of The Bird Saviors