“With its ornate design, Zachary Thomas Dodson’s narrative features books within books, eccentric characters and intriguing parallel story lines... The exquisite visual features prove enriching, rather than distracting... It’s hard not to admire the author’s meticulous effort and ambition.”

“Pick up Bats of the Republic and — even before you start reading — you’re instantly transfixed... a glorious demonstration of what old-fashioned paper can still do in the hands of a creative genius…Bats of the Republic cumulatively becomes a book about the way books are made and the way stories work. Novels, Dodson suggests, are contraptions, jury rigged together with parts of other novels, archived letters, remembered conversations, maps, scraps of info, imagined journeys, and creatures real and strange. Archetypes of the cowboy story, tropes drawn from sci-fi, love letters, diaries, confessions all abound in this relentlessly engaging tale. Dodson has quite brilliantly exposed the gears and cogs whirring in the novelist’s imagination. It is a mad and beautiful thing.”

“You want a taste of epic Western machinations filtered through epistles and transcripts and stories-within-stories? You want an arcane tapestry of weird fantasy enhanced by transgenerational mysteries and their possible solutions? You want a character-rich and treacherous journey through the ancient Republic of Texas with a reluctant, heartsick emissary from the Museum of Flying, and with his beleaguered blood relative hundreds of years in the mechanically surveilled future? Then you want to experience this thickly threaded wonderment, citizen – you really, really do.”