Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country he has marvelously distilled a monumental work realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him in a killing that obsessed his favorite son. Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that as Watson’s wife observed "still casts its shadow over the nation."
