Nicholas Belardes

A writer of the American West, Nicholas Belardes’s fiction combines elements of the literary fantastic, fantasy, eco-horror, and science fiction. His obsession with nature, history, the world’s ongoing climate disasters, blended with a daily birdwatching habit, has filled his prose with not just warblers and flycatchers, but also other obscurities from the natural world. From the habits of migrating creatures, to odd nighttime encounters on coastal California’s Montaña de Oro trails, to a mountain of bones he came upon in the outskirts of Helena, Montana, Belardes’s connection to the natural and strange, surrealistically and emotionally comes to life in his work.