Beyond This Point Are Monsters was published by Random House in 1970. Robert Osborne, a young rancher in the Imperial Valley of southern California, disappeared one night a year ago. His truck was found abandoned, his blood on the seat, but no body was recovered. His wife Devon petitions the court to have him declared legally dead so she can sell the ranch and begin a new life. The hearing requires reconstructing Robert’s final night — and that reconstruction reveals the seething racial tensions of the California-Mexico borderlands.
Millar’s setting is precisely rendered: the Imperial Valley in the late 1960s, where Anglo landowners depend on Mexican labor while despising the laborers, where the border is both a physical and a psychological frontier, where violence simmers beneath a surface of agricultural routine. The “monsters” of the title are not supernatural but social: prejudice, exploitation, sexual jealousy, the casual brutality of economic power.
The novel’s structure — a legal hearing interspersed with reconstructed narrative — allows Millar to present multiple, contradictory versions of events without resolving them into a single truth. What happened to Robert Osborne? The answer depends on who is telling the story, and Millar is too honest to pretend that any single perspective captures the whole.
Collecting Beyond This Point Are Monsters
First edition (Random House, New York, 1970): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75