Quaternity

After 2014's brilliantly brutal Haxan, Hoover revisits his nightmarish American West, a blood-soaked wasteland where "land belongs to the man strong enough to take it, and keep it." This prequel of sorts serves as backstory for Haxan's John Marwood, a killer-for-hire roaming the Tex/Mex border. Taking up with the depraved Abram Botis, Marwood finds himself tasked with killing anyone and everyone who stands in the way of land-greedy ranchers. Botis is also obsessed with the mythical golden city of Cibola, and as his warped philosophies shepherd Marwood into acts of unforgivable savagery, the story transforms from a tale of bad men doing bad things into a penetrating exploration of the violence inherent in America's construction and an operatic treatise on "pain and death%E2%80%94a thing indescribable and of no comprehension to any sane man." Readers seeking a simple horse opera should look elsewhere; the depth of Hoover's narrative hews far closer to the moral complexities of Cormac McCarthy than it does the straightforward adventures of Louis L'Amour. A western of blood and violence with a marked lack of redemption tinged with hints of the fantastic, this is a pitch-black western that resonates. (May)