This Is Dismal

Following The Heartless Ranch Is Haunted, this is the second novel in the This Is Dismal series. This is the one you have been waiting for. With a driving soft thriller plot and elegantly deliberate sci fi elements, this is also a great entry point for your first Dismal read. Welcome to the Dismal world, welcome home.

Go back to Dismal when Ashley comes to live with her sister Emmy and her friend Phoebe on their family's haunted ranch in Nebraska. Go back to 1951 and find out what really happened over there anyway.

From Dallas to New Mexico to the Sandhills of Nebraska and across two timelines explore the lightly spooky connection between generations in this western family saga. Featuring ghost cowboys and homemade nuclear batteries, hallucinated horses and the Boot Hill cemetery, the modern ranching family called the Hammonds and their dignified patriarch Mr. James Hammond- fans of authentic western culture are sure to find their new favorite stories.

From the tender but exuberantly impulsive Emmy to the fast driving and semi-clairvoyant Phoebe, Y2K women and fans of women's friendship stories are sure to find their new favorite duo. And as the story layers deepen in This Is Dismal, we discover the emerging friendship between rivals Ivory and Doris, who were neighbors in 1951, when Ivory becomes terminally ill and faces dying alone.

We find out who Don the young cowboy ghost was when he was alive. We meet the honest soul Joe, who would give up his own life to stop the deaths in his family. Through strange cattle drives and mysterious natural phenomenon to eminent domain testing ranges and the intuitive Agent X's clash with the wild cat like desert cowboy Otto, this is a book for the reader that wants to go somewhere they have never gone before.

From Nebraska novelist and quilt fabric designer Bunny Hammond, this novel will take you inside the imagination of the modern western world. Dismal is a bold expressive place, as intelligent and refined as it is untamed. Our ancestors are closer to us than we realize and nothing is ever really gone. Welcome home.