Unassigned Territory

by Kem Nunn

"[An] accomplished new novel that confirms the promise of Nunn's first book, Tapping the Source .... Nunn writes with a keen portentousness about the warped people in this wasteland, creating what might be described as a western gothic. His examination of cultish thought is respectful, intriguing, and funny, in a narrative that never loses dramatic momentum." — Publishers Weekly
Lay preacher Obadiah Wheeler is responsible for conducting a group of missionaries into "unassigned territory," a stretch of Nevada wilderness open to evangelistic efforts. Obadiah's faith is shaky at best and no match for the tempting charms of the co-proprietor of a desert museum, raven-haired beauty Delandra Hummer. Together the two set off into the vast emptiness of the Mojave in search of a buyer for the museum's prize exhibit, an extraterrestrial relic. Their hilarious road trip — punctuated by encounters with UFO cults, wild rednecks, and hippie burnouts — throbs with violence and madness as well as the possibility of spiritual enlightenment. This "desert noir" by National Book Award nominee Kem Nunn was recognized as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice; the author has also written for and produced numerous TV projects, among them John from Cincinnati , Deadwood , and Sons of Anarchy . 

Genres: Fiction, Noir, Mystery, Novels, Horror

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 1987

About the author

Kem Nunn (born 1948) is an American fiction novelist, surfer, magazine and television writer from California. His novels have been described as "surf-noir" for their dark themes, political overtones and surf settings. He is the author of five novels, including his seminal surf novel Tapping the Source. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine.

He has collaborated with producer David Milch on the HBO Western drama series Deadwood. Milch and Nunn co-created the HBO series John from Cincinnati, a surfing series set in Imperial Beach, California which premiered on June 10, 2007. He has also written for season 5 of Sons of Anarchy.

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weird desert noir-ish road trip novel set in the early 70s and taking place deep in the Mojave Desert, featuring UFO cults, regular cults, bizarre Pynchonian conspiracies, and a lowly roadside attraction/museum that may contain a real alien artifact with strange powers should be right in my wheelhouse, but most of the narrative is taken up by the rather tedious internal thoughts of the main characters, and it never really maintains any forward momentum at all.

It’s 300 or so pages felt like 500 due to all the naval gazing, and the fact that I never identified with the characters, but I still enjoyed the overall vibe and atmosphere of the old ramshackle desert towns and rundown rest stops and bars populated by conmen, bikers, stoners, religious freaks and UFO freaks. It’s possible I wasn’t on the right wavelength to fully appreciate this, so I’ll be checking out more Kem Nunn in the not too distant future. Maybe even this one again, eventually.

Still not sure how this got nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, as it has very little to do with the horror genre, imo. Would have been funny if it had beat out King’s Misery and McCammon’s Swan Song (which shared the award that year, though I would have went with Garton’s Live Girls).

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of Unassigned Territory deserves a five star rating. Kem Nunn has created an array of interesting characters that could be out of a Rob Zombie movie. Obadiah Wheeler is accompanying a group of preachers led by the gigantic hard drinking Harlan Low across the unassigned territory of the Mojave desert. On the way, he stumbles upon Delandra Hummer with whom he runs away. They take with them an alien artifact recovered by Delandra's father Sarge Hummer, in the hope of selling it. Her brother and Harlan Low give chase.

The book works best when Nunn lays down the setting. Kem Nunn goes to great lengths to describe the small towns of the Mojave desert. The desert is peppered with mining towns with names like Trona and Porkpie Wells. The bars, motels, convenience stores and used book stalls are an important part of the book. While Nunn describes these abandoned towns as wretched and ugly, I got the feeling that he actually has a thing for these places. He describes them like a conspiracy theorist would describe them on a first visit. Almost as if these arid small towns have secrets related to UFO's, mysterious covert projects and alien invasions.

It is the second half of the novel, when Obadiah and Delandra embark on the road trip, that the novel falls apart a little. The plot points are not that interesting, the book turns into a jumbled mess with Nunn failing to create suspense and tension. The mythological stuff was vague and it felt like Nunn was trying hard to finish the novel. But I am intrigued enough to check out more of Nunn's work.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kem Nunn's difficult-to-classify second novel features loopy and frequently-intoxicated characters driving back and forth across the Mojave, in pursuit of religious experience and other esoteric goals. That's the best one-sentence description I can come up with at the moment, anyway. The first twenty pages or so had me expecting a Hunter S. Thompson-style degenerate buddy odyssey, but the book isn't really that. It was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, which would seem to carry certain connotations and which I kept expecting would eventually make sense, but which only left me scratching my head all the way to the end. And I've seen it referred to as "desert noir", but I think that's a bit misleading as well. It'd probably at least be fair to say, as Jayakrishnan noted in his review of Nunn's The Dogs of Winter, that Nunn seems invested above all in his settings- and to add that in this novel he's particularly enamored with the idea of the Mojave as an eerie place where strange beliefs and ideologies appear as persuasively, and vanish as quickly, as heat mirages.

I like that idea, too. I haven't spent much time in the southwest, but I did take a Greyhound from Flagstaff to Vegas a few years ago (en route to Salt Lake City- long story), and the landscape along that stretch of I-40 really did make me feel as though I were on Mars. I can only imagine the strange gods and ancient rituals I'd end up babbling about if I had to spend even a month in the general vicinity of places like Kingman or Bullhead City. In any case, Nunn populates the Mojave with characters and legends that I at least initially found pretty fascinating. And the novel itself is an audaciously weird mix of genres, I'll give him that. However, as with his first novel Tapping the Source (which I nevertheless liked better), I often felt I was reading two books in one- as if there were an unrepentantly transgressive and scatological B-novel trying, and failing, to shed its patina of "literary" respectability throughout. I don't mean just in terms of where the story goes either, but Nunn's sentences themselves are often ponderous and overwritten in a way that dulls both the action and the humor of the story. They feel labored over. The tone is mostly comedic, but the book is rarely funny. It's a triptych of spiritual quests, or maybe a satire of such quests, but either way I never connected very much with what the characters were on about. Different characters often seemed to be doing the exact same things (mostly driving through the desert while drinking beer and, using similar thought processes and similar internal voices, trying to solve mysteries). And the plot became extremely convoluted and dense, composed of puzzle pieces that were sometimes intriguing, but didn't amount to much in the end. I get the sense that that was kind of the point, and I too enjoy novels that leave you with unanswered questions, but the questions have to be well-formed enough to linger and leave the reader haunted. Overall, I guess I found the book to be a bit of a mess.

I feel bad about saying that, because I sensed influences- Thompson, Dick, Lovecraft- that are right up my alley, and I'm sure I'd have plenty of books in common with Kem Nunn if he had a Goodreads account. I'm also left with the nagging worry that, between work and life and other bullshit, I was too distracted to appreciate something I should have enjoyed. One passage in particular towards the end combined humor and foreboding so wonderfully that I could almost imagine the entire book had been this good:

"You had to wonder, though, just what there was left for the old boy to do anyway- if suicide and insanity were his stock in trade? The dude had after all been a long time gone. What if, upon getting one good look at what had come down in his absence- his own shadow as it were- the son of a bitch should lose his nerve, turn right around and beat it, straight back to the safety of eternal night. A big disappointment, no doubt, for all concerned."

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

There has always been hints of the occult and evil in Kem Nunn’s books, but none take a full on plunge into the territory (unintentional pun) like this book. Not a horror novel really but a book that slowly reveals itself like a half remembered dream or nightmare with a slightly awkward start and remains fairly disjointed but becomes gripping as you try grasp any thread of logic to pull you through a labyrinth of UFO cults, crazed rednecks, mythology, bizarre murders, gone to seed hippies, something called “the mystery of the Mojave”, and other high desert weirdness. The plot is part caper, part religious vision, part horror, road trip, comedy, and all weird. Comparison to David Lynch, Nathaniel West, Repo Man, and Flannery O’Connor are well earned by these bizarre proceedings. Resonances with Manson Family, Jonestown massacre, Zebra killings give this spooky stuff some weight, especially delivered in Nunn’s earthy style with its causal vulgarity and clearheaded descriptions. Nunn’s work is all underrated but none more than this forgotten second novel.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the weather warms up my mind drifts to the open road, and Kem Nunn's brilliant southwestern gothic novel Unassigned Territory hits the spot. I'm looking forward to reading Pomona Queen.

Nunn is great for fans of fiction about psychedelic drugs, UFO's, strange happenings, stranger religions, hippies, bikers, "California," and pot-induced paranoia. Recommended for fans of Repo Man, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, with a healthy dose of Scanner Darkly thrown in for flavor.

[Paul McBride · Rating 2 out of 5]

I remember reading "Chance" by Kem Nunn, and wondering how could a guy who wrote: Tapping The Source, Pomona Queen, Tijuana Straits, and possibly the best of all of his books, Dogs of Winter, how could that author write a book this bad? Now I know. At some point after Tapping The Source, the author wrote this book "Unassigned Territory". What a dogs breakfast of a book this is. For some reason Mr Nunn, felt that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, didn't do justice to the death of the American Dream, and so he decided to write this little opus, and stage it in the Mojave Desert in 1970. All of the characters are boring and one dimensional, and there really doesn't seem to be any point to the story, and it drags on forever. I couldn't believe it was only 300 pages, it felt like 1000.
Skip this one and "Chance" and enjoy the rest of his books.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who discovered Kem Numn due to John from Cincinnati, and is a big fan Jfc, this was a great novel. I am a skeptic, a disbeliever in all things, but there is something about the absurdly unexplained in fiction that really appeals to me. I love the loose ends of this novel, the nagging suspicion that within the fictional reality of it, the main characters were truly on the precipice of a metaphysical clusterfuck and that perhaps if the book had continued past the last page all questions would have been answered... But what fun would that have been?

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written.

[Kevin]

No stars. DNF

[BooksRgood · Rating 4 out of 5]

dang my book club..so many other books I'd prefer to read but delved into this assignment.
Right from the dedication (when the author paraphrases Kerouac describing Cassady as an 'expert at subjects yet to be identified') I really enjoyed the oddball characters in this strange adventure/mystery with added supernatural aspects. Thanks book club!

Some quotes that I enjoyed:

"The really crazy part - Rex thought later when it had all ended - was that none of them, none of those families on their way to Death Valley, none of the Vegas bound high-rollers, $50 haircuts, white belts and double knits ablaze beneath the desert sun, none of those husband and wife Harley Davidson teams in color coordinated leathers, none of the conventioneers, the endless parade of UFO watchers, 4-H’ers, Cowboys and truckers - not one of the whole miserable crowd ever did get to see the last and final version of the Thing- the one without a name because just to look at it had been enough to send both Rex and Delandra running for the door and the night beyond it, the one that was so very smooth without a hint of chicken wire or fiberglass or resin, the one whose strange and cavernous skull held eyes that were somehow still alive and could roll right with you, smoke you sucker, on the very spot, and Rex had to admit that it would’ve been worth something to have stood there just one time with the Sarge, to have watched just one batch of tourists spill out of that clapboard gloom and make for their cars - real fast the way Rex liked to imagine it, tripping over their own goddamn feet fumbling for keys and yelling at their squalling brats - driving like madmen back out into those terrible miles of nothing, knowing at the bottoms of their stingy souls that somehow things were just a little weirder than they had originally thought, that the Mystery of the Mojave was for real, Jim, you better fucking believe it."

"Vindication would cast her shadow among these barren hills yet and if she was a long time coming it was at least good to know that upon arrival she would swing a heavy boot."

"Later he believed he had learned the truth of Paul's words when he said that God's word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life is trying to do something about the difference."

"It was, after all, he thought, what every man needed: something to hope for, something to do and someone to love."

"And God knows it was a mistake to fuck with a man of destiny when his time was at hand."

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of all of Kem Nunn's books, and I think I have read them all, this is my least favorite. That may be partly because the story has nothing to do with surfing or the ocean and I am partial to those subjects in Nunn's hands. That aside, a mediocre Kem Nunn read is WAY better than many other options for how to spend your time.

"There was something else going on and he would be damned if he could say what it was, only that deep inside, in a core no one saw, tiny gears were failing to mesh, miniature wheels had broken from their stems and run afoul of the wiring." ........and..........this gem:

"A lifetime of yearning unwound before him like some lost and endless highway, humming in a voice he could not name."

........I can name it Kem Nunn. It's the blues.

[surfurbian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I maybe unfairly judging this authors early book by his more recent work.

I see all the seeds of the weirdness (compliment) that is Nunn's but the story seems somewhat discombobulated and difficult to follow. There is a moment at the end where things begin to pull together. A pivotal moment when the narrative comes to a kind of fruition. It still for me remains a suggestion and something that does not quite make the phase shift.

The sensation I have is similar to that I had at the conclusion of "John from Cincinnati". Sort of "Um, what just happened?".

I would contrast this to the end of "Tapping the Source" and "The Dogs of Winter". In these two narratives, there was an unfinished quality that gave the sense of a new beginning. Again this story comes close to that but does not pull it off like the two aforementioned stories.

[Lenny Husen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about religious cults, possibly Jehovah's Witnesses, Moonies, Scientology, LDS, or a combination of those. The ending was disturbing to me. I didn't like it as much as Tapping the Source or Dogs of Winter (two of the best books I've ever read). However, I left it at my in-laws house and my father-in-law picked it up and read it. He said it was outstanding. So I do recommend it if you've read the other books mentioned above and like Kem Nunn (and who wouldn't--he's amazing).

[Rachael]

Unassigned Territory is a hard story to pin down with a review. It skips out on an active plot in favor of navel-gazing and moody inner monologues. The characters spend the majority of their time on a road trip and muse to us about their lives leading up to that very moment. There are multiple people with POVs, and they are all on their own road trip.

Obadiah is who I consider to be the main character. He is a member of a cult, The Way. The members are driving around California, knocking on doors, and attempting to recruit people. They are focusing on the outskirts of the state rather than the more popular cities. They live their lives free of sin, and Obadiah starts our story by sleeping with a prostitute. He is unsure if he is truly happy with his current life and flirts with deserting.

After getting the car brigade lost, Obadiah finds himself at a tourist attraction. Originally set up by a recently deceased con man, it features a figure that may or may not have been created by human hands and certainly creeps people out. Various characters become transfixed with it, going to lengths to both acquire it and stay away from it. Obadiah and Delandra, the con man’s daughter, steal it and drive off intending to find a buyer for it.

Read More here (spoilers ahead): https://sweetlydarkbooks.home.blog/20...

[Jack Bentele]

My least favorite Nunn even though it’s so completely up my alley it’s ridiculous. Maybe that’s why. Cool ideas and some nice lines as always but the diffused POVs felt too spread out this time. But that’s the desert for ya. To each their own walkabout. Still fun.

“…God’s word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference.”

“It was, after all, he thought, what every man needed: something to hope for, something to do, and someone to love.”

“Perception is an embrace.”

“Rex said nothing. In the courtyard the shadows had begun to lengthen. He tried to picture in his mind what a red, white, and blue pussy might look like.”

[Jonathan Trinder · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star might seem harsh but at Goodreads it means "did not like it", and I didn't. I'd go into detail but the LA Times review pretty much says it all. It's a good thing Nunn followed this up with two great books.

[John Cooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Nunn's laconic style and wacko plot line, but I fear this novel strays too far from his comfort zone, the Pacific Ocean. An enjoyable read, but at times I feel the premise of the story may have been cooked up over a peyote session deep in the desert night.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

quirky and entertaining

[Greg Carman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this hard to follow over the first half and eventually gave up.

Interesting characters but the plot was too convoluted and the storyline just dragged.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to agree with the general consensus that this is not Kem Nunn's best book...far from it, in fact. He's an excellent writer, but this one, well....right from the beginning it was a hard read due to the obnoxiously named characters (Obadiah and Delandra)...names that are so outdated and stereotypically white trash are hard on the eyes and stop the flow of a story. Secondly, the story started building and suddenly started twisting and became almost silly...the ending just sucked.It left a lot of holes and just went nowhere fast. I felt like this one really wasted my time. The best part of this novel was the descriptions of the desert and the accuracy of the "desert rat" mentality.

[Modbon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Years ago a friend foisted two Kem Nunn books on me (this one and Pomona Queen), insisting that they were the Second Coming of Southern California noir. I couldn't get all the way through either of them. Now I realize this is the same guy who may have lured David Milch away from "Deadwood" and toward the unfortunate "John From Cincinnati." Ptooey.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you love religious cults, dessert cults and UFO cults with a biker or two thrown in then this book is for you!

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Delandra Hummer forever!

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not his best book. Most similar to John from Cincinatti tho, which doesnt say much.

[Cyanemi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my least favorite. I want ocean stories I wish he would write more books he is an amazing author.

[Faye Johnson · Rating 1 out of 5]

A total waste of time, nothing but a pretentious piece of trash.