Deer Season
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel
It’s the opening weekend of deer season in Gunthrum, Nebraska, in 1985, and Alma Costagan’s intellectually disabled farmhand, Hal Bullard, has gone hunting with some of the locals, leaving her in a huff. That same weekend, a teenage girl goes missing, and Hal returns with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight. When the situation escalates from that of a missing girl to something more sinister, Alma and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of, as rumors fly and townspeople see Hal’s violent past in a new light.
A drama about the complicated relationships connecting the residents of a small-town farming community, Deer Season explores troubling questions about how far people will go to safeguard the ones they love and what it means to be a family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PW reviewer Flanagan's masterly debut novel (after the collection It's Not Going to Kill You) dissects a young woman's disappearance from a small town in 1980s Nebraska and the pervading suspicions throughout the community. Twelve-year-old Milo Ahern discovers his 16-year-old sister, Peggy, missing from her bed on a Sunday morning. Her family, assuming she has snuck out again to drink, makes excuses for her. But when her absence lingers, rumors begin to spread and fingers are pointed at Hal Bullard, an intellectually disabled 28-year-old farmhand. Alma Costagan, the brash school bus driver and Chicago transplant whose farm Hal works on alongside her husband, Clyle, defends Hal, though blood in Hal's truck and reports of him returning early from a hunting trip raise questions. The narration oscillates between Alma reflecting on her 14 years of isolation in the town, her five miscarriages, and the pain of Clyle's affair with a local woman; and Milo, a nerdy misfit struggling to cope with his sister's disappearance and his longing to leave the tiny town behind. Flanagan balances the mystery and its surprising resolution with her emotionally rich character explorations. This is a standout novel of small-town life, powered by the characters' consequential determination to protect their loved ones at any cost.
