Ruth at the End of the Earth
Order from By Common Consent Press
If you thought that what Paul Muad'Dib needed was a provident Mormon family's food storage, have I got a thrilling adventure tale for you. A cold-eyed and terrifying vision of a future southwest, Ruth at the End of the Earth is Dune on a human scale, Mad Max with Mormons in the red rock country. Stripped of all pretense and civilization, bound and driven by their own ancestors, a man and a woman fight the world and each other to survive the burning desert at the end of time.--D.J. Butler, author of Witchy Eye and Abbott in Darkness
Bennion’s book is an accessible and inspiring reflection on the small- and broad-scale implications of technology. We as readers are challenged in this gripping climate narrative to see how others weigh the trade-offs that have already been made and will yet be made as we work to sustain ourselves and our neighbors on this finite world. The story of Ruth provides a way of thinking about our future that is both cautionary and personal.--Richard Gill, Global Change Ecologist
So thoroughly has Bennion imagined this terrifying future that I found myself caught up in its claustrophobic world. I felt that I shouldn’t go outside in the sunlight. I found the romance of a moonlit night supplanted by the need to hunt food in the dark. I felt the full force of Ruth’s terror at being in this version of Salt Lake City. I felt the pain of the journey that Ruth must undertake to save her family. And I shared her ambivalence at the end about what she must decide to do. All this leaves me terrified at what we have done to our Earth.--Dennis Clark, Poet and General Nuisance
A native of the Utah desert, I write personal and historical essays and fiction about people struggling with that forbidding landscape.