Mad Hell-Rush of Days
Saskatchewan, 1895. Spencer Pearse stands outside the cabin he built for a bride he hopes is on the way—or is he still waiting for Val, the boyhood friend who once shared grand dreams of raising horses far from the gaze of their fathers?
On the other side of the Frenchman River is Josie Grant, who has prayed for eight years for a baby. She loves her husband, a deaf homesteader who paints and sings, but this won’t do.
While a half-mad Josie follows a hint from the Lord, Spencer risks losing everything in a secret Vancouver rife with ‘confidence men'.
Mad Hell-Rush of Days is a dark, tautly oiled portrait of life, desire, and loss in a long-forgotten era. A story of two misfits whose worlds collide on a wild, harsh prairie.
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Coffee is a telling marker in fiction of the frontier, from Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. So when we encounter eighteen-year-old Spencer Pearse, in 1892, drinking a mug of “black acrid” coffee in Spences Bridge, British Columbia, in the first chapter of Natalie Appleton’s Mad Hell-Rush of Days, we know instantly that this young man is our hero and we suspect that our author is one to be trusted. That inkling is confirmed on nearly every subsequent page of a near-perfect novel.
-Kyle Wyatt, Literary Review of Canada
Mad Hell-Rush of Days has been featured in:
Literary Review of Canada: ‘In the Cypress Hills with Natalie Appleton’
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