Eileen
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ottessa Moshfegh’s dark, mysterious thriller explores a young woman’s struggle to escape her everyday hell. Eileen is fed up with her world, living with a father she hates in a nondescript Massachusetts town while enduring a tedious work life at a local juvenile detention center and longing for companionship. When she befriends Rebecca, the charismatic new staff psychiatrist at her job, Eileen gets a glimpse at how different her life could be. But when they get caught up in the ugly truth behind a crime of one of the incarcerated people in their orbit, their friendship takes a twisted turn. The way Moshfegh renders Eileen’s arch, unforgiving perspective on the world is sad and striking. The story’s gritty details and unsavory turns are the stuff of classic suspense films. Plus, Alyssa Bresnahan’s measured narration perfectly captures Eileen’s harsh view of herself and her life. Even when the story’s done, you’ll still be pulling apart what really happened.