The year is 1911.
In Cold Spring Harbour, New York, the newly formed Eugenics Records Office is sending its agents to catalogue the infirm, the insane, and the criminal—with an eye to a cull, for the betterment of all.
Near Cracked Wheel, Montana, a terrible illness leaves Jason Thistledown an orphan, stranded in his dead mother’s cabin until the spring thaw shows him the true meaning of devastation—and the barest thread of hope.
At the edge of the utopian mill town of Eliada, Idaho, Doctor Andrew Waggoner faces a Klansman’s noose and glimpses wonder in the twisting face of the patient known only as Mister Juke.
And deep in a mountain lake overlooking that town, something stirs, and thinks, in its way:
Things are looking up.
Eutopia follows Jason and Andrew as together and alone, they delve into the secrets of Eliada—industrialist Garrison Harper's attempt to incubate a perfect community on the edge of the dark woods and mountains of northern Idaho. What they find reveals the true, terrible cost of perfection—the cruelty of the surgeon's knife—the folly of the cull—and a monstrous pact with beings that use perfection as a weapon, and faith as a trap.
Bram Stoker Award-winning author David Nickle follows his award-winning 2009 short story collection Monstrous Affections with Eutopia, a novel of the early American eugenics movement, mis-applied utopianism, and a terrible monster.
Publishers Weekly has marked David Nickle as “a writer to watch.” Cory Doctorow has called his writing “bourbon-rough, poetic and vivid.” In Eutopia, David Nickle invites the reader to join him on a terror-filled journey to the birth of the last century’s greatest nightmare.
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