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.โ So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennonโs 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. Whatโs more, the name of the owner is blacked out.
Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost impenetrable forestโlifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching white deerโthat is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do with Americaโs current military misadventuresโand Loeschโs secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid age. The answer to whatโand whoโmight lie at the heart of Loeschโs property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, โcontains enough electricity to light up the country.โ
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