Sterling City

by Stephen Graham Jones

When a Martian moon explodes, what follows in rural Texas will take your breath away, in this haunting short novel from the New York Times–bestselling author.

When Lee’s wife of fifteen years leaves him on the same night a Martian moon is destroyed, the fields of his farm still need to be irrigated and the cotton planted. The space accident is too far away to concern Lee more than boll weevils and rain forecasts—but then a giant caterpillar is found on his land.

For months, all Lee sees of the caterpillar are the pieces it leaves behind from molting . . . until the night the moon debris makes its way to Earth.

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novella, Fiction, Fantasy

86 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 2013

About the author

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author thirty-five or so books. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but Valis and Love Medicine and Lonesome Dove and It and The Things They Carried are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It's a big change from the West Texas he grew up in.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange and a bit hard to follow, Sterling City centers on a real obstinate bastard of a Texas farmer whose life unravels as the world around him gets weird and seemingly goes to shit. Jones perfectly captures a mood of melancholy and desolation, blending personal collapse with the eerie sense that world itself is coming apart.

[Ethan’s Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is framed as a documentary-style investigation into a violent, half-abandoned Texas border town called Sterling City. The town has a long history of murders, disappearances, cult rumors, and “bad land.” The narrator compiles police reports, interviews, newspaper clippings, and firsthand accounts to piece together what happened there.

What Sterling City really is

Sterling City isn’t cursed in a supernatural way — it’s a place designed to attract violence.

The town sits on land that has historically been a site of:
• Indigenous displacement
• Brutal labor practices
• Generational abuse
• Repeated acts of cruelty and injustice

Over time, people drawn to power, dominance, or violence keep gravitating back to it. The town becomes a pressure cooker — not because of ghosts, but because violence is normalized, repeated, and inherited.

The giant caterpillar is not a literal monster.
It’s a symbolic image that represents slow, grinding, inevitable violence — violence that changes form but never disappears.

If I’m being blunt:
👉 Sterling City is a book about ideas, not a story that respects reader payoff. If you wanted tension, escalation, or even a weird concrete explanation, it fails by design.

For my fellow readers that have full time jobs and families and want to unwind by reading a story. I would rethink this one… unless literary horror is your jam and that’s how you unwind. For me, I would have enjoyed this story more if I didn’t have anything going in my life, and my brain wasn’t already mush by the time I got home from work. If you’re a bookstagrammer, book-tocker, or book tuber, I’m sure you’ll love this story.

This book caters to the literary horror readers. I like symbolism, but there is a way to do it that doesn’t confuse the reader. But I digress… maybe that’s my own comprehension problem. To me the story felt like driving a stick shift for the first time, with no instructions or help, I’m facing the wrong direction and I need to make a U-turn on a heavily trafficked gravel road. No offense. I will continue to try SGJ books. But so far I haven’t “loved” any of them.

[Jamie Grefe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love novellas that I can jump into, get lost, and get out--especially when they are as well-written and original as this one. Of course, it's Stephen Graham Jones, so we know we'll be entering into some sharply constructed, tightly woven, unexpected, detailed (to just the right amount), and compelling story. And this one is no exception. The synopsis is outlined above in the description area and that about nails it. In terms of stories with beautiful final acts, this one takes the cake. It's like we knew it was coming, but didn't know how we were going to get there and it's even better than we expected. If you want to know how Stephen Graham Jones writes, without reading a long novel, here's a shorter alternative that is extremely satisfying and beautiful.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this strange story. Beautifully written. And that ending...🤌

[Lorin (paperbackbish) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Open Road Media for my free ARC of Sterling City by Stephen Graham Jones — reissued edition available Oct 1!

» READ IF YOU «
🚜 have ever worked on a farm or done farm chores
☄️ geek out when you see a shooting star or meteor shower (it me)
😾 love unlikeable characters who become slightly more likeable

» SYNOPSIS «
Zoe walks out on Lee the same night that Mars' moon explodes. Lee just smirks and carries on, expecting that she'll come crawling back sooner or later. But instead of a penitent wife, Lee and his farmhand discover something else crawling through the fields, and it's huge. And dangerous. Can it be contained? Or will the creature, like the wife, do anything to break free?

» REVIEW «
Ever wanted to know what it's like to do farm chores during the apocalypse? Well now, finally, you can! No but seriously, this story sneaks up on you. It's a novella, so it's short, but there is a ton of sentiment hidden between the mundane chores and freaky alien bugs. I was honestly kind of floored by how this ball of emotion ambushed me at the end? I know I shouldn't be surprised anymore with SGJ, but alas. I'm a slow learner.

Initially, Lee presents as callous and belittling, laughing as his wife tries frantically to leave their property. But dang. Through all these tiny moments of daily life afterwards, we inch toward Lee's realization that life is desolate without Zoe — and at the very end of the world, all he would have chosen is more time with her, even if it's just a few borrowed hours. Oh and there's an alien caterpillar, so. It is science fiction, after all...

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really dug this. It's the perfect length for a story, too.

It's not my favorite by Stephen Graham Jones. It's a great novella though. Lots of heart and interesting ideas and unexplainables.

Also, no one writes better Acknowledgement pages than Jones. Even in just a few hundred words he can make you feel as much as the novel you just read made you feel.

But, yeah, great story and characters here. Highly recommended.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*. I was hooked from the start, just along for the ride.

"Maybe a giant caterpillar was what every farm needed, Lee thought, covering his smile with his gauzed forearm. Instead of herbicide, a guard dog."

[M.E. · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I didn't care for this chapbook, it was very well written and a page turner.

It started out really strong for me, but then didn't go anywhere and wrapped up with a sacharine flavored, staggeringly unrealistic happy/tragic/inexplicably-hopeful ending that just didn't make any logical sense.

It is a character study of a lazy, alcoholic, selfish, terminally immature, apathetic jackass as he deals with his wife leaving him again by treating everyone around him like garbage. I simply couldn't muster sympathy for him despite the author's attempts to make him sympathetic. I was sorely disappointed and more than a little disgusted that he not only survives the story, but that his wife for no apparent reason other than it's the end of the story.

There are just too many things that don't stand up to scrutiny or logic for the scifi aspects of this story to succeed but if you like a little science fantasy thrown into a story that's mostly about an a**hole's reaction to losing his wife and what a sh*tty person he is, then you might like this story.

This is mostly drama though. The science fantasy aspects of it are just a backdrop.

As I said, while it's not to my liking, the writing is very effective and the main character, while reprehensible, is still very realistic.

Death toll: 5 dogs, plus one dog abused by the protagonist who also also attempts, but fails, to murder it.

[Tarrah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing was good, but I still don't know what the hell happened.

[Daniel Petersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review is cross-posted from http://ridethenightmare.blogspot.co.u... .

In my own definition of the 'Weird Western' I extend the sub-genre's purview to include fiction set not only in the western United States of the 'cowboys and indians' era, but also that set in the 20th and 21st century western U.S. - as long as said fiction also includes elements of the uncanny or macabre or otherwise outré. So in addition to books by, say, Arianne "Tex" Thompson and Guy Adams it would also include books by, say, Joe R. Lansdale and, our man of the hour, Stephen Graham Jones. (To take an example from a single author's oeuvre, the Weird Western encompasses both the 1850s Texas-Mexico setting of Cormac McCarthy's scalp-hunting odyssey Blood Meridian and the 1980s Texas-Mexico setting of his brutal crime thriller No Country For Old Men.)

This is my third review of a Jones book (the first two are here and here) and I think I can say that his is always a western sort of vantage, albeit a contemporary Blackfeet Native American one. (That said, explicitly American Indian characters are by no means a guarantee in his fiction.) His works also always seem to contain some element of the bizarre or gruesome, from out and out genre material, such as zombies and werewolves, to surreal and 'meta' narration of dark and mysterious events and relationships. And Jones's brand of weird can imbue a range of modes from crime thriller to family drama to horror story, all with loose and blurry borders, often hybridised, and yet always 'literary'. I've rarely seen someone so joyously and offhandedly mix the 'highbrow' and the 'lowbrow'. (All the 'high' stuff is in the prose style and themes by the way. It's the content that seems pretty consistently working class, with occasional white collar stuff in the margins.) There's often a lot of poignancy, and ever an undercurrent of very, very wry (and occasionally bonkers) humour. (I get these impressions from having dipped into his first few novels as well, an experience I'll return to below.)

So, to a degree, I think all of Jone's work can be said to be of the Weird Western mode, though that by no means captures the entirety of what he's doing. In fact, his kind of western writing is really just showing us how weird the western USA (and at a larger scale, existence itself) simply is, a fact we are prone to ignore. Thus our need for prophets like Jones. And thus advancing my own theory that all good literature is weird literature, all good philosophy is weird philosophy, all good theology is weird theology, etc. And by the 'weird' I don't mean just the 'messed up' or the morally twisted. Jones's is not a freakshow literature for the titillation of easterners' prejudices. It's a regionalised mirror that can be held up to anyone from anywhere to show that the comically grotesque carnival shapes are not in the glass but in life. For all of us.

Reality is weird.

Sterling City is a lovely little meditation on just that. Coming in at a mere 81 pages, it's a one-sitter for you fast readers out there and a two or three sitter for slowpokes like me. I don't want to give too much away, but on page one you know there's a cosmic element and by page six you see a big reveal of the creepily weird, which the rest of the novella circles round as a major plot factor. In tandem with this knowingly pulp element is the story of the breakdown of one man's marriage. Or rather, the very moment his wife leaves him and his attempt at playing that event cool, and failing to. Both of these - a grotesquery's arrival and a spouse's departure - would be highly dramatic events in real life, and yet Jones's relentlessly elliptical and indirect style makes them seem almost like things that happen in the corner of your eye. I mean, he confronts both directly. You get a juicy view and the weird element in particular is initially surrounded by strong emotion from one of the characters. But it feels like the view is for mere seconds at a time. The history of the marriage's troubles and the present bizarre cosmic influences come only in half-understood glimpses for the reader. Both of these happenings consume the consciousness of the protagonist, yet both seem oddly just off stage for most of the novella.

Similarly, the larger West Texas landscape is fully backgrounded in favour of the farm on which the story unfolds (with one episode in town). This makes for a tight focus. It achieves some atmosphere in its concision, mostly focused on farming equipment and farm buildings and farm work. This is good, and I enjoyed being there in that kind of small psychogeography. Yet I can't help but feel that the story's possibly a little too long to sustain its own smallness. After forty pages or so I felt it needed to somehow open out to the greater environs more, and possibly the point of view of more characters. I enjoyed being in Lee Graves's head, and recognised a little of myself in him, but a story this length needed a little more scope I felt. It's a fairly minor complaint and by no means ruined the read. There were, it must be said, about ten pages toward the end that didn't work at all for me. It was supposed to be a tense scene of the central piece of large equipment almost malfunctioning, but I have no knowledge of this whole area (farming and its equipment and procedures) and the description did not enlighten me, so I was just plain bored. But again, it was a minor misstep and the story finished well. The denouement of the weird element was especially satisfying to me, gorgeous with alien wonder.

Indeed, this is kind of a story about the Beauty of Monsters, which I can always get behind. It's also very intentional and explicit about hope in the end, about New Beginnings after the Apocalypses that punctuate our lives. It reminded me of R.A. Lafferty in that respect. This actually makes it incredibly radical among its Horror and Weird Fiction cohorts, which tend, especially among the avant-garde, towards powerful pessimism and bleakness (the avant-garde of the Lit Fic crew can be this way too, and Double-Fish Jones swims in both worlds). The story doesn't promote hope without any ambiguity mind you. And from what I've read from Jones so far, he has a number of pieces both for and against hope and lots of places in between. His despairing pieces, however, are always poignant and humane and even kind of sweet. He seems to want to hope, even in despair. That might make him kind of 'out' with some of the Cool Kids of Nihilism, I don't know. I hugely respect it.

I'd probably give this particular book something like a 3/5, but right now I'm more into Jones for the total package than merely for particular works. He's a presence, a force. Following his elusive, yet somehow generous, remarks on Twitter and Facebook round out both his style and substance, just like his 'Acknowledgements' at the end of Sterling City. (Always be sure to read any dedications or story notes or other authorial 'paratexts' by Jones - he's always telling you a little bit more of what he means and who he is and what he cares about in those things, even whilst deepening the mystery). Any time you see an article written by him, it'll be worth checking out as well. I'll note here that I'm still trying to find my way into his more 'literary' works. I read around a hundred pages each of his first two novels, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong and All the Beautiful Sinners, and while both blew my mind on some level, both also kind of lost me with the almost painfully indirect style in which he wrote them. Mind you, I wasn't really committed to reading them at the time. I was only dipping and dabbling and when they proved difficult, I shelved them for a future go. Which I look forward to, along with a ton of his other prolific output, both on the more literary end and on the more genre end. His is an exciting career to follow.

[Melissa Leitner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite SGJ but I don't think it was ever going to be. This is categorized as both a sci-fi and a horror. Usually, sci-fi is not my jam so the fact that this isn't my favorite SGJ is not surprising. I still did enjoy myself while reading this and the sci-fi bits aren't the ones that I didn't jive with. This one has a lot of farming talk that honestly just went right over my head. I think if I read this one again (completely possible as it is only 88 pages), I might understand a bit more of what was happening in the middle chunks. I loved the weird scenario the main character was in and he is a bit of an unlikeable character that was written so well, I think I might actually like him. Absolutely worth the read as it is SGJ's signature prose style and a story that is deeper than just the weird scenario it is proposed to be.

[Chris Townsend · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a strange and deeply absorbing melancholy tale about life, and possibly the world, unraveling. At times it's vague and hard to follow, but I really can't understate how absorbing it is. For all his flaws, I liked the apathetic, stoic main character. Would that we all could watch our lives fall apart with so little upset.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

My heart aches and explodes , falling like ashes from the moon because of this story. My new fav male writer by miles. Unbearably good.

[Glinda Harrison]

DNF. The voice in point of view in the writing made this really difficult to follow and enjoy.

[Billy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Graham Jones says he has a big caterpillar but then sticks with a guy who misses his wife and the guy is kind of a jerk, so it’s no shock she ran off.

Anyway, the world isn’t over, but some times it feels like it, and then you see a big moth. 4 stars.

[Heather Bair · Rating 3 out of 5]

This read like an obscure episode of The X Files that nobody talks about and I’m kind of here for it

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty solid novella. There's a quickness and constant motion to the style that's really interesting, especially when it comes to how Jones builds character through action rather than exposition, though (by the end) I started to feel like that also worked against it in a story this length, since too many of the best elements are implied rather than developed, and things move quickly even when I felt they should have lingered for a while. I doubt this is the best thing Stephen Graham Jones has written, but there's some really solid writing and a few great moments along the way, so I'd say this is somewhere around a 3.5.

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gotta be honest, I rarely had any idea what was going on.

I didn't think the writing was good or easy to follow. Didn't think the story was interesting. Didn't think the characters were well written except for maybe the mc

I just feel like nothing happened and it was the same thing over and over again with such little intrigue.

This was the first major flop from Stephen Graham Jones for me. And weirdly the second scifi book by a favorite horror author to not be enjoyable at all from me (the other being Badasstronauts by Grady Hendrix,)

[Nancy DiGiovanni · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this because it looked like a little, simple read. There are only 72 pages after all. But it took me forever just to force myself to get to page 24 when I finally gave up on it. What a weird style of writing. It seems insanely detailed about irrelevant things and then also strangly stucatto in story flow.
I gave up on a 72 page story, lol. That's how bad it is. Just my opinion of course.

[Robert Fletcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must not be the target audience for this one. It didn’t really work for me.

[Timothy Patrick Boyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the people on the talk shows were right: the end of the world was here.

One of the most crippling things imaginable is drastic, unexpected change. Stephen Graham Jones's Sterling City understands this idea completely. It also understands that not all change is bad; not all change means the end of something. In fact, sometimes the most alarming change leads to something truly beautiful, something glorious, something new.

This one didn't entirely work, for me. However, SGJ's storytelling is eerily beautiful, his lead character so intriguing in their despondency, and his themes so poignant in the weirdness of their execution and the hope in their heart. This one might've not entirely worked for me, but it'll certainly stay with me.

6.5/10
[3.5 Stars, Rounded Down]

[BirdieTracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, Weirdness, and Farming

This is a story that goes about itself when it’s darn good and ready. I know that might sound strange- but the story is strange. The main character is truly unlikeable. Always covering his mouth so others don’t see the smile when he says something unpleasant-but things can change…

Overall, the story part that should knock your socks off isn’t as moving as the smaller stories that set side-by-side.

[Linda Brinkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. Great opening Line: “The night Zoe left, it rained fire.” Now read those last lines, too!! I won’t type all to still give the vague spoiler, but the 2nd to last line is “They were wrong.” !!!
So many thoughts finishing this.
“Not because thinking of the __made him feel naked. Not because he wanted to wear the mask, to be able to hold his face perfectly still like that, give nothing away.”

[BookswithLydscl | · Rating 4 out of 5]

A marriage breaks down as the world ends. A different kind of horror for me from SGJ. I loved the beginning and the end but the middle I wasn't as hugely caught up in as I never clicked with Lee - can understand why Zoe leaves him. Doby and Stace are a lovely pair and I loved the humdrum of ordinary farm life with this looming sense of dread consistently sitting in the background from the 'caterpillar' and the fallout of the moon exploding.

[Val Pristera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird things are happening at Lee’s farm. His wife Zoe, has left him for “The Professor” who lives across the way from his farm. His teenage farmhand, Doby, is a bit distracted by his girlfriend, Stacee. And, oh yeah, a space probe has inadvertently destroyed a moon of Mars, called “Phobos”, causing havoc on earth. To say more would be unfair. This quick read will make you wonder and squirm, perhaps not in that order.

[coty ☆ · Rating 2 out of 5]

i'm finding that sgj's books are either Incredible or Bad with very little middle ground; it's like everything works for me, or nothing does. loved the initial premise but i just don't think the story explored it the way i thought it would/wanted it to, and i couldn't connect with the story and characters at all.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Stephen Graham Jones' work, but this one wasn't my favorite. It was hard to root for a protagonist that had no redeeming qualities. Also, I just couldn't wrap my head around the circular system, and it was described a lot. Also, why did Lee even have it on at the end without crops in the ground? Anyway, the story was cool, but didn't grip me as much as his other writing.

[Amanda F · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of Lee and his time of dealing with his wife leaving him for his neighbor. That is all, and it is not at all everything that happens! :) As usual, Jones takes the readers on a windy, literary road to tell a basic story in a very non-basic way. Great story!

[Tarah Wellman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel that you almost need an extensive knowledge of farming equipment to understand what is going on. There were times when I was reading this I feel like I lost touch with the story and just trying to figure out what they were talking about.

[Jordan Whitlock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, a very much underrated novella from Stephen Graham Jones!! Haven't heard much about this one, so I was surprised that it has become one of my favorite works from the great SGJ (and I've read a lot of SGJ). So much fun. This was funny, scary, and gloriously sci-fi Lovecraftian fun!