Broken River
The most suspense-filled, inventive thriller you’ll read this year
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Following a string of affairs, Karl and Eleanor are giving their marriage one last shot: they're moving with their twelve-year-old daughter Irina from Brooklyn to a newly renovated, apparently charming old house near the upstate New York town of Broken River.
Before their arrival, the house stood empty for over a decade. The reason is no secret. Twelve years previously, a brutal double murder took place there, a young couple killed in front of their child. The crime was never solved, and most locals consider the house cursed.
The family may have left the deceptions of their city life behind them, but all three are still lying to each other, and to themselves. Before long the family's duplicity will unleash forces none of them could possibly have anticipated, putting them in mortal danger.
This new novel by America's master of literary rule-breaking is part thriller, part family drama, part Gothic horror - and like all J.Robert Lennon's novels, it shows the consequences of human deceitfulness, and the dreadful force the past can exert on the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"All of the stories we tell ourselves are wrong," says a character in Lennon's (See You in Paradise) novel, a family drama and murder mystery whose metafictional flourishes bear out the truth of that observation. When Brooklyn artist Karl Jandek moves with his novelist wife, Eleanor, to an upstate home in Broken River, N.Y., to save their failing marriage, they neglect to tell their adolescent daughter, Irina, that the house's previous owners were brutally murdered on its grounds a decade earlier. Bored with her new home and writing a novel herself, Irina begins poking around the Internet, participating in chat groups devoted to the unsolved crime and posting a photo of Sam Fike, a young woman in town whom she is convinced is really Samantha Geary, the grown daughter of the murdered couple. When the murderers get wind of the renewed interest in their cold case, the stage is set for their violent return to the scene of their crime. Lennon alternates the scenes of his coalescing crime drama with asides involving the Observer, a silent, substanceless embodiment of the all-seeing omniscient narrative viewpoint that is powerless to prevent the snowballing misinterpretations and misunderstandings each character sees from his or her own perspective. The result is a finely tuned tragedy whose well-developed characters are all the more sympathetic for the inexorability of their fates.
