The Valley of There
by Louis Combe
$12.95 paperback, 184 pages
Published: October 2002
ISBN 1880849-48-8

Order Online
To order by phone, call 866-942-8389

Insulated from external threats by formidable natural barriers, a land founded on the ideals of freedom and balanced multicultural diversity finds itself torn apart from within by greed and prejudice. Something must be done to arrest the religious intolerance, inequitable taxation, environmental pollution, and overpopulation that beset the land. Somehow, the ideals of the social contract must be renewed before all spirals into irredeemable chaos. But what is to be done? Who will do it? And, all the while, as the inhabitants focus on their internal conflicts, they remain blind to the unknown common enemy lurking at their borders.

A pre-9/11 portrait of the United States? Not really, for the time is before the Roman Empire will expand from the Italian peninsula to envelop what we now call Switzerland and the rest of Western Europe. This Beset Land is the home of Celtic mystics, Gallic farmers, and Teutonic warriors. It is the strife-torn world of Louis Combe's latest novel, The Valley of There.

Within his systematically crafted milieu of Beset Land, author Combe spins an intriguing mix of socio-political allegory, legend, myth, fantasy, and adventure. From the Here Plains to the Valley of There, with its forbidding Ennead Fortress, the unequal ethnic triumvirate of Druids, Rustics, and Barons struggle for and against the civil rejuvenation that could save them all. Against this background, Combe's central characters discover themselves locked into mystical cycles of endless recurrence, reincarnated love, and perpetual self-renewal.