The Damagers

One of 49th Shelf’s Most Anticipated Spring 2025 Fiction • A Quill & Quire Notable Book of 2025

A stark, incendiary novel about two sisters seeking refuge with a reclusive cult in the Adirondacks: a parable of power and how it is claimed, wielded—and how it transforms.

“Stampeding, mesmeric.” —Claudia Dey
“Awesome in atmosphere. . . . Utterly electrifying.” —Waubgeshig Rice

On a summer evening in 1952, young sisters Zina and Presendia run hand-in-hand into the wooded hills of upstate New York, fleeing their family farmhouse as it collapses into flames.
      Deep in the Adirondack mountains, they en­counter a gritty band of “settlers” occupying a dilapidated sportsmen’s complex nestled along a secluded mountain lake. The girls soon be­come inculcated in the spiritual training and rustic hedonism of the group, attracting the interest of its profane but visionary founder: a rough-necked charismatic named Peter.
      Selected by Peter from the ragged but devoted congregation for her erudition and steely temper, Zina is tasked with codifying his rev­olutionary teachings in a book—a testament to rouse the masses, prophesying the rise of a new consciousness from the ashes of decadent mid-century American society.
     As ghosts from the sisters’ violent past resurface, and the construction of a major highway ex­tension near the settlement accelerates Peter’s anarchic agenda, Zina must choose between turning her back on her new life and adopted flock, or seizing the power she so desires and taking her place next to Peter in the great cata­clysm to come.
      A haunting, strikingly vivid depiction of an isolated world, power and its reproductions, and the forgotten, darker side of postwar American life, The Damagers is potent, unset­tling fiction from an exciting literary talent.