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Best-selling author Dan Chaon grew up in an isolated patch of western Nebraska, a place that’s haunted his fiction ever since.

Chaon, 52, is from Sidney, a small town near the bottom of the state’s Panhandle. Many of Chaon’s books and stories are set in secluded places not dissimilar to his hometown. His new novel, the literary thriller “Ill Will,” continues this tradition: casting much of its dark story (which revolves around serial killings and satanic cults) in the fictional town of Bonaventure, Nebraska, which is based on Sidney.

The author’s lyrical, vaguely sinister descriptions will be familiar to anyone who’s lived in the western part of the state: “The fields, lined with telephone poles; the grasshopper oil wells, gently nodding their sleepy heads. At the edge of the horizon, the hills rose up from the flatland. Along the tops of the hills were gnarled volcanic cliffs and boulders, pocked and jagged. In the summer, when the sun was right, the shadows of cliffs and rocks could be said to resemble faces, or the figures of animals.”

Beneath this starkly gorgeous setting, horrors lurk.