Dark Things I Adore
A Novel
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- 16,99 €
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- 16,99 €
Publisher Description
"[C]areful and sinewy plotting, which reveals in chilling detail who gets to make art, and who gets subsumed in the process."—New York Times Book Review
A debut thriller for fans of Lucy Foley and Liz Moore, Dark Things I Adore is a stunning Gone Girl-esque tale of atonement that proves that in the grasp of manipulative men, women may momentarily fall. But in the hands of fierce women, men will be brought to their knees.
Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay.
1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They're the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed.
2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé's remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web.
Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max's secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won't be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.
A searing psychological thriller of trauma, dark academia, complicity, and revenge, Dark Things I Adore unravels the realities behind campfire legends—the horrors that happen in the dark, the girls who become cautionary tales, and the guilty who go unpunished. Until now.
"A smart, nuanced exploration of victims and villains, inspiration and theft, and the intersection of these things, in every artist. Pay attention to Katie Lattari. She's the real deal."—Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Thanks to Stephen King, we were already well aware that the state of Maine could provide a great backdrop for dark and ominous storytelling. Katie Lattari takes it a step further with this chilling tale of ruthless vengeance. When handsome, egomaniacal professor Max Durant is invited to his student Audra Colfax’s country home, he thinks she’ll become another disposable muse in his long list of discarded women. But Audra has something much more sinister in the cards for her mentor. Moving back and forth between a teen summer arts camp in 1988 and Audra’s place three decades later, Lattari crafts a complex tale that tackles hot-button issues of mental health and emotional abuse and weaves in intriguing details like hidden notes and secret nicknames. Dig in and get ready for a feminist thriller with some major bite.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lattari (American Vaudeville) makes her thriller debut with a complex, deeply disturbing tale of vengeance. In 1988, Juniper returns to King City, Maine, to resume teaching at the Lupine Valley Arts Collective, a sleepaway camp for aspiring artists. There, Juniper befriends Coral, the newly hired cleaner who also dreams of becoming an artist. It becomes clear that Coral is mentally ill, and as Juniper tries to intervene to help Coral, tension builds among Juniper's circle of friends. One night, two people witness a death in the woods, and secrets remain buried until 2018, when Audra Colfax, a Boston Institute for the Visual Arts graduate student, plots her revenge. The alluring Audra invites her thesis mentor, the pompous, womanizing artist Max Durant, to travel with her to her home in Maine. Readers will soon pinpoint Max's role in the death 30 years earlier, though he's not as quick to ascertain Audra's true intentions for inviting him to Maine. After a slow start, the plot gains momentum and builds to a chilling conclusion. Those who are comfortable with a cast of morally ambiguous characters will best appreciate this one.
