“At once bleak and pleasingly beautiful the novel grows true from pain, betrayal, loss, love, and pale salvation.”         —Winner of the 2015 15 Bytes Award for fiction.

“Hepner’s writing is luxurious….[He] has put in the daily work with this fine novel, its keen words and sentences furrowed like lines eye-measured and trued….[He] takes us on a journey along with the broken, shit-begrimed souls of this small town.”     —Larry Menlove, 15 Bytes

“Pale Harvest is a dark novel by a deft storyteller.” —Samantha Updegrave, High Country News (Also Editors’ Pick of the Best New Fiction)

“Gutsy writing…. A strange, gorgeous, grief-raked rumination on man’s place in heaven and earth.” —Andria Williams, Military Spouse Book Review

“As brilliant an evocation of the textures and details of complex labor as any I have ever read…. A profound novel.” —Scott Abbott, The Goalie’s Anxiety

“Pale Harvest‘s dark brooding portrayal of the rural west mixed with searing honesty and brutal life on a dead-end dairy farm left me sleepless.  Brilliant in its emotions and character development.” —Andy Nettell, Back of Beyond Books, Moab, UT

“[A]n unforgettable literary blast….Hepner’s characters are among the most compelling to be experienced in contemporary fiction….[R]eaders will be moved by the author’s poetic rendition of the land’s unique topography that inflames, confounds, and rarely satisfies one’s personal hunger for carving out a meaningful and happy life.” —Les Roka, The Utah Review

“Hepner’s starkly poetic voice leads us into the lives of characters torn between the imagined glories of the infinite and the raw realities of hard labor here on earth. Pale Harvest is an unforgettable addition to the ever more various stew of American literature.” —Scott Spencer, author of Man in the Woods, A Ship Made of Paper, and Endless Love

“Hepner is a master storyteller, a craftsman of the first order, and a fine new talent. His Western Realism is a refreshing jolt, a throwback to Steinbeck and  Stegner with its own stamp of uniqueness.”  —Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead, Exit A, and Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

“Dazzlingly laconic, making poetry of the sheer sweat and physicality of everyday life in a worn-out landscape.” —LIBRARY JOURNAL, Small-Press Gems

“Famously Firsts” —LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Set in a rugged scrap of Utah, this first novel rings with the hard-scrabble tones of Steinbeck…Pale Harvest is lush with unusual vocabulary and microscopic detail that combine to evoke a land and a kind of life singular to the American West…Readers interested in a uniquely American novel will be well satisfied with this bleak yet redemptive book.”  —Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword Reviews