Debut horror novel by Boulder brothers full of chills

Rights to 'Old Country' have been sold to Netflix

It’s a solidly American dream: Having made it in the Big City, it’s time to bow out of the rat race and move to the country, mountains or desert, where distractions are fewer, the air is fresh and life is, well, simpler.

But countless are those couples or families who find rural life a tad more rugged than anticipated. There always seems to be a fence to fix, livestock to feed or doctor, and seasons seem to become more intense versions of themselves beyond the concrete canyons of the city.

All things considered, the protagonists in brothers — and Boulder natives — Matt Query and Harrison Query’s debut novel “Old Country” are better prepared and tougher than most when they move to a small ranch in the remote Teton Valley of Idaho.

Harry and Sasha Blakemore have one very faithful dog, Dash, but no kids. He’s a Marine veteran who had to make hard decisions in combat during the Iraq War; she’s smart, tough and done with corporate America and hectic city life.

“Harry — and I, to a certain extent — didn’t really feel as though Colorado qualified for categorization as the ‘real West’ anymore. We’d been living in Denver for the last seven years, and it had started to feel like LA or Phoenix,” Sasha notes early in the novel, written in first-person and alternating between their two points of view, chapter by chapter.

The place they’ve bought, sight unseen, looks like a dream come true.

“It’s amazing country,” Harry enthuses to his wife. “It’s just trout-filled rivers, aspen forests, public land everywhere.”

But then the only neighbors within miles, an older couple named Dan and Lucy Steiner, shatter the illusion of peace with a very curious bombshell: a powerful earth spirit haunts the valley, manifesting in very specific ways in each of the seasons, and can only be forestalled by the performance of no-less specific actions by the younger couple.

At first skeptical, Harry and Sasha are shocked when the first manifestation materializes: a ball of light in their small pond and a booming sound emanating from the mountains. Harry reluctantly sets the fire advised by the Steiners to keep the spook at bay, but not without a few angry thoughts: “This little western folklore narrative can go f*** itself.”

The summer manifestation is considerably more bizarre, requiring extreme action on the couple’s part. The autumn episodes are even more intense. And though the Steiners at first claimed that there is no winter manifestation, Sasha and Harry soon learn otherwise.

“Strange things happen in old country like this,” Sasha eventually concedes.

Eventually, she tracks down the only surviving member of the family that used to own the place and discovers that she and Harry will be trapped in their dream home forever unless they take drastic action to break the cycle of haunting. And that will require Harry to face a much more horrifying and personal manifestation of the spirit.

“It hit me then, the realization that this thing wanted me to give it a reason,” Harry realizes. “It wanted my rage.”

The brothers Query, having grown up hunting and fishing in the Rockies surrounding Boulder, have an excellent feel for the grace, beauty and sometimes daunting wildness of mountain life. It surely doesn’t hurt that Matt and his wife bought and lived on a small ranch in rural Oregon before recently returning to live in Boulder ( Harrison also recently re lo - cated to h i s hometown after years in Los Angeles working as a screenwriter).

Indeed, as Joe, whose Indigenous family has occupied the valley for centuries, eventually explains to the young couple, the spirit manifestations tell a symbolic tale running from creation through man’s conflict with and purported “conquering” of nature.

“Only when mankind has grown beyond its origins, tamed its predators, mastered the lands, only then do the worst of our instincts emerge,” Joe says. “Turning on one another. Spilling one another’s blood.”

Harry’s battle with the final manifestation will deeply into his deepest secrets and guilt.

Though neither author served in the military, they do an excellent job of writing in that vernacular when it comes up. The novel is peppered with salty language, as one might expect from a combat-hardened leatherneck and his toughas-nails wife.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned here, not least of which is the wisdom of traveling this Earth with a trusty, faithful canine: “I heard Dash take in a deep breath and looked back down at him to find his noble gaze still fixed, as ever, on the horizon. … Watching, and waiting.”

But mostly, this is a fun, fast-moving, vividly written — the brothers have already sold the rights to and written the screenplay to Netflix for possible future production — natural-horror tale that manages to be spooky even as it evokes the soaring wonder of the wild.