The Dark Prairie

An absorbing picaresque journey through 1870s Kansas...in a prose that is at times sheer lyrical rapture, and other times tough and lean as sinew... Jarrett's ravishing prose style lifts these characters above their everydayness into a realm of transcendence borne within James's mind, as his innate nobility shines despite a daily life crammed with people bent on killing one another.

-Johnny Payne, author of the 2021 IBPA Ben Franklin Gold Winner, Confessions of a Gentleman Killer: A Novel

A haunting frontier adventure that blends both danger and heart, The Dark Prairie is both a gripping rescue story and a resonant coming-of-age journey. The prose is vividly cinematic, rendering the vast winter prairie and the unforgiving Santa Fe Trail with remarkable immediacy. It's the kind of emotionally grounded, visually expansive storytelling that feels tailor-made for adaptation-equally compelling on the page and ripe for the screen.

-Rebecca Graham Ford, Executive Producer, Television

The Dark Prairie delivers the perfect balance of artistry and entertainment, pairing vivid prose with the adventure of a great Western. Jarrett's nuanced characters and bold final revelation challenge our myths about cowboys and vigilantism, making this a Western that feels both timeless and startlingly new.

-Eric Z. Weintraub, author of South of Sepharad

Set on the Kansas frontier in 1870, The Dark Prairie follows sixteen-year-old James Tuck into the wilderness after his younger sister vanishes from their homestead - a disappearance that is not what it seems.

Riding west along the Santa Fe Trail with strangers who become family, James is driven by guilt, love, and a desperate need to prove himself to a father whose approval he has never earned. But the further he ventures from home, the more the world he understood begins to dissolve. Between moments of violence and stretches of haunted stillness, something far older and less nameable presses through - in the landscape, in the silence between people, in the strange luminous moments that arrive without warning and vanish before they can be held.

A literary Western that moves between the breathless and the contemplative, The Dark Prairie is a novel about the stories we construct to survive, the ones we must abandon to see clearly, and the indestructible thing that remains when all of them fall away.