Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

Year in Review

A number of publications related to the Lost Quarter were published in the past year and it seems appropriate to take this opportunity to highlight them for those wishing to better understand this place.  

The first is Days Without End a rather remarkable chronicle of the early days of homesteading on the Quarter by an unknown author from a manuscript discovered in a mourning box that was inadvertently opened following its purchase at a local farm sale. Beginning with his arrival to a desolate land emptied of its inhabitants, he describes those early difficult years of survival when only a handful of settlers were scattered across these parts, the coming of the railroad and the influx of so many others looking to make their lives, and the alternating years of plenty and drought that followed. It includes perhaps the only first-person description of the Great Sibbald Fire that is extant.  

The Silver Locusts is a series of interrelated tales, largely concerning an earlier interregnum where those indigenous to the Quarter (called the First in the text) lived and interacted with these strange new arrivals who had found their way to the Quarter. Misunderstanding, plague, violence, surveying, starvation and exile follow. It illuminates, as well as any other work I have encountered, how the paths into and out of the Quarter, which were once many and well-marked (or at least well-known) were fragmented and forgotten in the aftermath of this encounter. Leaving the Quarter and its environs in its current disjointed space, adrift from all that surrounds it. 

Concerning itself with more current affairs is Black Money a taut, grim survey of the current moment in the Quarter where oil barons and their minions try to cling desperately to what is rapidly becoming apparent is a failing empire. Like the late Byzantine kings their reigns are short-lived and bloody, everyone grasping and grappling for a crown which will not rest easily upon their heads, the foundations of their monuments falling away without their even noticing.