People keep asking me, “What’s up with Candace Owen’s attacking Erika Kirk?” While I don’t really care, to answer those caught up in the podcast soap opera, I am laying it all out as easily as I possibly can. To address a problem like Candace Owens, the first step is recognizing that something is amiss…

Lucas Hale had known fear in the usual ways a man learns it, flash floods roaring down a gulch without warning, the sudden buzz of a rattler too close to his heel, or the long, lonely nights when the wind could make a fellow think someone was calling his name from out in the dark.…

Lucas Hale had seen strange things in lonely country, but nothing that prepared him for the glow rolling off that old furnace. After hours of burning, it should’ve been dying down to embers and ash. Instead, heat poured from the rust-bitten hulk in slow, steady pulses, like the breath of some great animal sleeping in…

Lucas Hale had never been the kind of man to shy from a chore. The frontier cured a fellow of that quickly enough. But standing inside the sagging iron bones of the old furnace, with the Nevada wind humming through every rusted seam and the cold crawling its slow fingers up his spine, he knew…

Lucas Hale came down off the ridgeline like a man who had run out of choices long before he had run out of trail. The descent had been rough—ankle-breaking rocks under the snow, drifts that swallowed his knees, wind that scoured a man’s face clean of heat and hope. He’d been traveling for days, though…

The winter trails of Nevada have no mercy in them. They run cold and long and hard, and they care nothing for the strength of a man or the weakness in him. They wait to see who will cross and who will fall. Lucas Hale meant to cross. Each morning, when the frost snapped under…

Winter had its own way of settling scores in the Nevada high country. It carved the land clean, pared it down to rock and wind and silence, and a man either matched it or he didn’t. Out here, promises weren’t things you spoke; they were things you carried. And a debt, once taken on, rode…

Morning comes slowly in the Nevada high country. It doesn’t burst over the horizon the way folks who’ve never been there like to claim. Instead, it seeps into the world, thin, colorless, and wary, like a traveler unsure of the country he’s riding into. That was the kind of dawn Lucas Hale woke to, feeling…

Daylight Saving Time has returned, like a relative who borrows money and remembers the door code. The ceremony begins at two o’clock Sunday morning—an hour when only burglars, owls, and government planners are awake and thinking clearly. At that moment, we are to advance every clock in the house by one hour. It is said…

I paid a visit to the doctor the other day, which is always a hazardous undertaking for a man who has previously considered himself reasonably alive. The doctor studied his instruments, looked me over with the solemn interest of a tax assessor, and finally announced that I am, in his professional judgment, “a walking stroke.”…