Until Valhalla

A Novel of Sacrifice, Love, and the Cost of War

They say the best war stories aren't about generals or campaigns. They're about the men who carry the load.
Marc Richards is seventeen years old, wearing jeans too long and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. He works at a gas station in Millersburg, Ohio, where the corn grows high and the highways run straight to nowhere. His father died when he was six. His mother works double shifts as a nurse's aide. The coffee can under the kitchen sink is almost empty.
The army isn't his first choice. It's his only choice.

From the bleachers of his high school football field to the dust and heat of the Helmand River valley, Until Valhalla follows one young man's journey from a dead-end town to the front lines of America's longest war. It's a story about the weight of a rifle and the weight of a promise. About a girl named Jena who believes in him when he doesn't believe in himself. About a friendship forged in the crucible of basic training and tested in firefights where seconds separate the living from the dead.
But more than anything, it's a story about what comes after. About the knock on the door that changes everything. About the folded flag and the empty chair and the letter that says, "Open only if something happens to me."

W.G. Davis has written a spare, devastating debut that doesn't flinch from the reality of combat or the grief of those left behind. Until Valhalla is a meditation on brotherhood, duty, and the ordinary bravery of small-town kids sent to fight a war they didn't start.

Some stories about war are about glory. This one is about grace.