The Hunt Club
A Novel
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3.6 • 11 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It started with a body, the head of it pretty much gone, the hands skinned. We found it the Saturday after Thanksgiving, out to Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Uncle Leland owns the Hunt Club, which might make him sound important, or rich. But he's not.
Huger Dillard is no ordinary fifteen-year-old from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He may not have a father to help him grow up, but day-to-day guiding of his blind Uncle Leland--Unc, for short--and weekends spent at the Hunt Club have made him an expert on the habits of deer, the pompous attorneys and doctors of nearby Charleston, and the ways of the world. But with Unc's discovery of a mutilated body, Huger suddenly learns that he is expert at nothing--least of all his own life. Everything he knows and everyone he loves--Unc, his mother, his foundering teenage romance--is at risk, and Huger must use every ounce of resourcefulness and bravery to stay alive and protect what he believes in. Yet, when he finally discovers precisely what happened that Saturday morning, there is still one more secret to uncover, this one too dark, too deep, for him to even imagine.
From Bret Lott, the critically acclaimed author the Los Angeles Times called "one of the most im-portant and imaginative writers in America today," The Hunt Club is a novel of deft pacing and remark-able detail, and a sultry evocation of a land and culture that has existed for generations but soon may be lost forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The publisher calls Lott's fertile new novel both a mystery and a thriller. Whatever its genre, the book represents a departure in form for this author of four literary novels (Reed's Beach, etc.), two story collections and a memoir. There's no departure in theme or tone, however, as 15-year-old narrator Huger Dillard comes of age in a crucible of fear fired by the discovery of a headless, partially skinned corpse on his family's tract of wild South Carolina land. Lott skillfully explores the penumbra of family-centered despair that has shadowed his previous work, and does so in the loamy prose that has won him praise. Huger finds the body while acting as a guide, along with his "Unc," to a group of physicians from Charleston--the Hunt Club of the title. Within hours, Huger's life is threatened and his mother kidnapped, apparently to force Unc to sell the family land to those doctors. Lott works a tight, complex plot, however, and reveals only incrementally the link between the corpse and that conspiracy, which masks further conspiracies involving illegal drugs, insurance fraud and buried treasure. Devastating family secrets are exposed, as well. Lott's characters are as vital as heartbeats, as is his sense of place, but he occasionally chafes against the genre form. The novel's central sequence--a chase in the woods--goes on too long, and too many questions are answered by villains who can't stop talking. Lott's motifs, particularly regarding human fallibility (Unc is blind, there's a deaf and dumb girl, etc.) are too visible. Suspense runs high, however, and as a portrayal of a boy's acceptance through suffering of a world riven by sin but grounded in love, the book is moving, memorable, even masterful. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
The Hunt Club
Full of suspense. I couldn’t stop reading till I finished it. Excellent writing as usual.