For readers of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, and Ron Rash, the electrifying contemporary western thriller where Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men:  now in paperback .   Since their father's untimely death, Wyatt Smith and his twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on the family ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution.   Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld that pits him not only against the primordial ways of men and the brutally unforgiving landscape but also against himself. For the first time, he is forced to look at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice. The 25 Best Thriller Books of the Summer— New York Post Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 — Southern Living 46 Great Books to Read This Summer— Nylon Dazzling Debuts—WYPR 8 New Books You Should Read This June— vulture.com Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge—Refinery29 What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May—Outside " Rough Animals  . . . is that  rara avis : a fiction debut at once sure-footed, almost existentially gripping, and raucously, violently unexpected."— Vogue "Enrapturing . . . A brutal but beautifully written Western."? vulture.com ,  "8 New Books You Should Read This June" "A lyrical thriller garnering comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson . . . Will appeal to anyone who, like me, watched  Godless  and suddenly realized they like Westerns after all. . . . To simply describe the plot is to undersell the book's key quality?the way DelBianco's arresting, lyrical sentences seem to activate all five senses, plus your sense of fear."? Refinery29 ,  Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge "The tension doesn’t let up. . . .  If the narrative keeps you turning the pages, her almost Biblical voice makes you want to stay and dwell on each sentence ."? Outside , "What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May" “In this  haunting new novel  by Rae DelBianco, a child with a gun interrupts the lives of twins Wyatt and Lucy at their ranch in Utah, prompting Wyatt to set out on a harrowing journey across both interior and exterior landscapes?both of which prove equally complex to navigate.”? Southern Living ,  Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 "Written . . . so provocatively and viscerally."? Nylon , “ 46 Great Books to Read This Summer” " [A] dazzling debut." ?WYPR, "The Weekly Reader" "Rae DelBianco has a knack for writing action. . . . Once Wyatt is on the road, [she] showcases her talent for rich descriptions of the natural landscape, as well as a lack of abashment in approaching brutality head-on."? Chicago Review of Books   “Equal parts charming, strange, unpredictable, and genuinely horrifying.”— Cowgirl magazine   “ Furious and electric . . .  The novel succeeds as a viscerally evoked and sparely plotted fever dream, a bleakly realized odyssey through an American west populated by survivors and failed dreamers.”? Publishers Weekly ,  Starred Review “This take-no-prisoners debut from DelBianco has been compared to Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Ron Rash, Donald Ray Pollock, and Jim Thompson, and rather than argue, we'll just throw in Gabriel Tallent. Against a backdrop of  ferocious, visceral, almost psychedelically intense  nature writing. . .  Man, this 'redneck kid author' can write. ”? Kirkus Reviews ,  Starred Review “In this high-octane, take-no-prisoners debut, Rae DelBianco portrays the mayhem and grit of the new West with the demon eye of Cormac McCarthy but a fierce heart very much her own.  I dare you to draw a breath from beginning to end. ”?Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of  A House Among the Trees  and  Three Junes “ A brilliant, incandescent debut  that will remind everyone of a young Cormac McCarthy.”?Philipp Meyer, author of  American Rust  and Pulitzer Prize finalist  The Son “ Rough Animals  is the kind of novel that can teach you the mechanics of dissecting a bull with only an axe and a knife, or how to survive on a coyote’s blood if you’re waterless in the desert. It renders its portrait of brother-sister love and their pitiless world of the