Devil’s Valley by André Brink
When Flip Lochner, a seedy, tired journalist fleeing a failed marriage, sees a beautiful woman with four breasts in Devil’s Valley, he thinks it’s a mirage. But then a man called Lukas Death stands before him. So begins Lochner’s search for “the truth” first hinted at by a young student in Cape Town who was mysteriously killed. Lochner meets Lukas Death’s clan, where righteousness prevails by day and depravity by night, where punishment for misdemeanors is summary, yet brutal murderers walk unscathed. Nothing in Devil’s Valley is as it seems: the supernatural is an ingredient of every day, the living and the dead are never quite separate, the grotesque coexists with the banal.
Vibrant and darkly humorous, Devil’s Valley is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller.
