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Penguin
August 2015
On Sale: August 18, 2015
Featuring: Delvin Moorehead; Eileen Dunlop
ISBN: 1594206627
EAN: 9781594206627
Kindle: B00OZ0TM32
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
A lonely young woman working in a boys’ prison outside
Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime,
in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by
one of the brightest new voices in fiction So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me.
I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid
fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a
private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I
think of it now as what it really was for all intents and
purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin
Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so
to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a
week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared. The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop,
an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her
role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose
squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a
secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian
horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen
tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams
of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her
nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison
guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged
father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery
Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor
at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to
resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding
friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for
Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that
surpasses her wildest imaginings. Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New
England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s
story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now
much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely
funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early
Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and
shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices
in contemporary literature.
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