Horse Latitudes

Ethan, haunted by guilt in the wake of his wife’s tortured descent into madness, loses himself in a lawless and sensual world when he crosses the US’s southern border. Wandering without hope in a place that obeys only raw power, he meets a woman who saves his life and, in return, extracts his promise to rescue her sister, Mirabelle, from a Central American country on the brink of revolution before Mirabelle can be lured into deeper danger by the false coyote Soto. Pursued through crumbling cities and down a jungle river, Ethan finds himself in a country where personal and political traumas converge in a guerrilla war in which the sides are unclear and the stakes beyond reckoning. Ethan sought absolution and relief when he abandoned everything he knew, but to save Mirabelle, he must make a choice that will place him far beyond the borders of redemption. What ensues is an adventure in a feverish world of demented expatriates, intelligence officers, mystics, and lunatics as well as a harrowing examination of loss and dread, post-colonial blight and the impossibility of exorcising the ghosts of the past in the ruins of the present. As the reader accompanies Ethan southward, the book also reaches deeper into Ethan’s own history. Morris Collins’s lyrical, unsettling prose juxtaposes one man’s journey in a world of oblique machinations with the presence of memories he will always carry. Horse Latitudes is a lushly-written modern gothic — part thriller, part nightmarish journey into the moral uncertainty at the heart of the American experience in Central America.

Morris Collins of Boston, MA

Morris Collins received his MFA from Penn State University in 2008. His short fiction has recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Passages North, and the Los Angeles Review among other magazines. He lives in Boston. Horse Latitudes is his first novel.