Black Hills

Paha Sapa, 'Black Hills', is an American Indian shaman who as a young boy at the Battle of Little Bighorn believes that he has taken the ghost of the dying General Custer into his body. Sixty years later, while working as a dynamiter on Mount Rushmore, Paha Sapa plots to blow up the monument on the day President Roosevelt arrives to dedicate the Jefferson head. Meanwhile, Custer finds himself trapped in a strange, dark place and begins to write sensuous, heartbreaking missives to his beloved wife.

Thus begins an intricate narrative that sweeps across some of the most tumultuous and violent periods of American history, from the old West to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and into our own time and beyond. Paha Sapa possesses the ability to see into the memories and futures of legendary figures such as the Sioux war-chief Crazy Horse and Rushmore's sculptor Gutzon Borglum, a curse and a power which will stay with him throughout his long, event-filled life.

Black Hills is historical fiction with Dan Simmons' visionary twist. He weaves in real places, events and people with a thrilling tale of supernatural suspense to recreate a dramatically changing world.