Ecco, the literary imprint of HarperCollins, has announced Observer, a debut horror novel from Las Vegas writer Nicholas Russell, set for publication on September 15, 2026.
The premise is quietly devastating: Renata, a young photographer living a stalled life in Las Vegas, learns that her estranged mother — an astrophysicist — is presumed dead. In her mother’s place arrives a garage full of belongings: journals, photographs, a locked safe, and a $300,000 check. Renata drives out to McNairy, the remote Nevada desert town where her mother spent decades working at a now-shuttered observatory, armed with her mother’s personal journals and the century-old diary of a vanished river surveyor. What she finds is something the desert has been keeping to itself for a very long time.
The novel braids three distinct voices — Renata’s present-tense investigation, her mother’s confessional journals, and the nineteenth-century dispatches of the long-dead surveyor — into what Ecco describes as a story where the horror, when it arrives, is “genuinely unnerving — bodily, atmospheric, and remarkably strange.” Comparisons to Jeff VanderMeer, Mariana Enriquez, and Stephen Graham Jones are being invoked, which should tell you something about both the ambition and the darkness of the work.
Danzy Senna called the novel “coiled, restrained, beautiful and haunting…evoking the new Wild West and its lonely inhabitants, all of them searching. The result is deeply unsettling, urgent, dark and wry.”
Russell’s short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Baffler, and Hunger Mountain. Observer is his first novel.
Observer by Nicholas Russell is available for preorder now and publishes September 15, 2026, from Ecco/HarperCollins.
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