"And the Hills Opened Up"

David Oppegaard is the author of the Bram Stoker-nominated The Suicide Collectors, Wormwood, Nevada, The Ragged Mountains and And the Hills Opened Up. Oppegaard’s work is a blend of science fiction, literary fiction, horror, and fantasy. He lives in St. Paul, MN.

He applied the Page 69 Test to And the Hills Opened Up and reported the following:

Page 69 of And the Hills Opened Up:

“What happened?”

“Three men dead, sir.”

“Cave in?”

“No. I mean, yes, sir, some rock fell in, but that wasn’t what killed them.”

“Then what was it?”

The boy glanced up at the foreman. “Something…something got at their throats.”

Chambers pulled up. Sweat poured down in his brow in a mighty cascade of miserable salt water.

“Their throats?”

“Ripped’em clean out, sir. Blood all over.”

Chambers set his hands on his hips. He felt like keeling over right there in the scrub grass.

“Run back to my cabin, Randy, and tell Bonnie to give you my rifle. Go now and catch up with me.”

I couldn’t have picked a better page to represent this book, really. My new novel And the Hills Opened Up is a horror/western set in a Wyoming mining town in 1890. When the mining company blasts open a new section of the mine, a powerful and unsettling demon is unearthed.

In the above passage, the mine’s foreman Hank Chambers first learns something is terribly wrong down in the mine. Feeling sick with a summer fever, he decides to investigate the death of three men (the first of many deaths) on his own, taking only his rifle with him. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to confront something much worse and much stranger than three dead miners.

Yes, the Charred Man has been woken and is about to lay waste to the isolated town of Red Earth, Wyoming in a major way!

Visit David Oppegaard's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Suicide Collectors.

The Page 69 Test: Wormwood, Nevada.

--Marshal Zeringue