From
a thrilling new voice in fiction comes a chilling and deliciously dark novel
about an idyllic Midwestern college town that turns out to be a panorama of
depravity and a nexus of horror.
For
years Normandy Falls has been haunted by its strange history and the aggrieved
spirits said to roam its graveyards. Despite warnings, Edmund Campion is
determined to pursue an advanced degree there. But Edmund soon learns he isn’t
immune to the impersonal trappings of fate: his girlfriend, Morgan Fey, smashes
his heart; his adviser, Professor Martin Kingsley, crushes him with frivolous
assignments; and his dead-end job begins to take a toll on his physical
and mental health. One night he stumbles upon the body of Emily Ryan, an
unapologetic townie, drowned in her family pool. Was it suicide or murder? In
the days that follow, Emily’s husband, Charlie, crippled by self-loathing and
frozen with fear, attempts to flee his disastrous life and sends their twin
daughters to stay with the Kingsleys. Possessed by an unnamed, preternatural
power, the twins know that the professor seduced their mother and may have had
a hand in her fate. With their piercing stares, the girls fill Martin with a
remorse that he desperately tries to hide from his wife. Elsewhere, a low-level
criminal named the Gonk takes over a remote cottage, complete with a burial
ground and moonshine still, and devises plans for both. Xavier D’Avignon, the
eccentric chef of a failing French restaurant, supplies customers with a
hallucinogenic cocktail. And Colette Collins, an elderly local artist of the
surreal, attends a retrospective of her work that is destined to set the whole
town on fire.
Kevin
P. Keating’s masterly novel delves into the deepest recesses of the human
capacity for evil.
“Let’s
get this part out of the way: this is a breakthrough novel, one that makes a
career. . . . The plot is juicy but it’s Keating’s wordplay that draws a
reader in. . . . Keating’s got those nice long sentences and can always
grasp the exact right archaic word like Franzen or David Foster Wallace. But
anyone who’s read classic horror can quickly see he’s more influenced by the
words of Poe and Lovecraft than those pretentious Writer’s Lab types.” —James
Renner, The Cleveland Scene
“Literary
novels, horror, and humor seldom mix–fantasist Christopher Moore being one of
the rare exceptions–but now comes Kevin P. Keating to deliver a brilliant novel
so dark, yet so laugh-out-loud funny, that he’s close to inventing a new genre.”
—Mystery Scene Magazine
“A
black comedy that transcends its own offbeat energy and becomes truly
disturbing. . . . Shows Keating to be an astute student of spooky scene-setters
from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King to David Lynch. But in many of the final
passages, such as a horrific building fire, Keating proves to be at least their
equal. . . . A darkly funny read and a stylistic tour de force.” —Publishers
Weekly,
starred review
Purchase
links
About
Kevin P. Keating
After
working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio,KEVIN P. KEATING became
a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University,
Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and
stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, and his first
novel, The Natural Order of Things, was a finalist for the Los Angeles
Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His second
novel, The Captive Condition, will be released by Pantheon Books in July
of 2015. He lives in Cleveland.
Connect with Kevin on Twitter.
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