Upcountry

August 7, 2023
Nash (Animals Eat Each Other) returns with an unsettling story about a woman living with her ex-con boyfriend, Daddy, who has a strange insect fetish and emotionally neglects her. Dee-Dee spends her days working at a chicken plant in Missouri, where employees slaughter 50,000 chickens per day. At night, she returns home to Daddy and dreams about her baby-to-come: she’s tested positive on a pregnancy test again, after a series of heartbreaking miscarriages. When her childhood friend Sloane moves into the upstairs apartment, Dee-Dee’s relationship with Daddy changes in subtle ways, and she starts to wonder if Sloane—who, as a teenager, was impregnated by their church’s pastor and is now a mother—wants to take over her life. Dee-Dee’s fears, and the lingering church doctrine looming in her thoughts, drive the book to an explosive ending that will stun readers. Nash lays her characters bare, and the hints of body horror and vivid descriptions of Dee-Dee’s despair tease at underlying pathological issues (“You still have the mentality of a child,” Daddy tells her). Readers drawn to gritty character studies should take a look. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary.

October 23, 2023
The lives of three women from different social strata are entangled in Lee’s melodramatic debut. Claire Pedersen, a New York City lawyer, has moved to the Catskills with her husband, Sebastian, who hopes to reignite his previous career as an artist. They acquire through foreclosure the former family home of April Ives, a working-class mother of three. A parallel narrative follows Anna, a young member of an insular religious community that maintains a wary relationship with the other locals. Tragedy erupts early when a very pregnant Anna agrees to Sebastian’s request to model for him, precipitating a traumatic stillbirth. Thereafter, the lives of all three women converge as much by fate as by the happenstance inevitable in a town this small (Anna and April share a domestic cleaning job, Claire works on a case involving April’s godson). Lee develops her main characters convincingly, especially the remarkably resilient April, but her tale unfolds less as a well-plotted story than as a series of vignettes yoked together by unlikely coincidences: an explosion during a drug deal involving April’s ex-convict husband, offstage deaths of key players, bad storms, and so on. Despite some fine episodes, this doesn’t quite hang together. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary.