Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel

"Archetypes of the cowboy story tropes drawn from sci-fi love letters diaries confessions all abound in this relentlessly engaging tale. Dodson has quite brilliantly exposed the gears and cogs whirring in the novelists imagination. It is a mad and beautiful thing. --Keith Donohue The Washington Post Winner of Best of Region for the Southwest in PRINTs 2016 Regional Design Awards Bats of the Republic is an illuminated novel of adventure featuring hand-drawn maps and natural history illustrations subversive pamphlets and science-fictional diagrams and even a nineteenth-century novel-within-a-novelan intrigue wrapped in innovative design. In 1843 fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas must leave his beloved in Chicago to deliver a secret letter to an infamous general on the front lines of the war over Texas. The fate of the volatile republic along with Zadocks future depends on his mission. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail he happens upon something impossible... Three hundred years later the world has collapsed and the remnants of humanity cling to a strange society of paranoia. Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope from his grandfather an esteemed senator. When that letter goes missing Zeke engages a fomenting rebellion that could free himif it doesnt destroy his relationship his family legacy and the entire republic first. As their stories overlap and history itself begins to unravel a war in time erupts between a lost civilization a forgotten future and the chaos of the wild. Bats of the Republic is a masterful novel of adventure and science fiction of elliptical history and dystopian struggle and at its riveting core of love.