In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and
bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the
county.” So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennon’s
gripping, spooky, and brilliant new novel. Unforthcoming,
formal, and more than a little defensive in his encounters
with curious locals, Eric Loesch starts renovating a
run-down house in the small, upstate New York town of his
childhood. When he inspects the title to the property,
however, he discovers a chunk of land in the middle of his
woods that he does not own. What’s more, the name of the
owner is blacked out.
Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost
impenetrable forest—lifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching
white deer—that is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian
massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do
with America’s current military misadventures—and Loesch’s
secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid
age. The answer to what—and who—might lie at the heart of
Loesch’s property stands at the center of this daring and
riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to
Ann Patchett, “contains enough electricity to light up the
country.”
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