The Night Country A Novel

One year following their deaths in a late-night car accident, teenagers Danielle, Marco, and Christopher return, in spirit, to the sleepy New England suburb of Avon. Over the course of the evening, the three will drift into and out of the lives of those who knew and were affected by them. None is more affected than Tim, survivor of the crash, who plots a grisly act of remembrance, and Brooks, the well-intentioned police officer who first discovered the crash and whose life has changed in startling ways since. Stewart O'Nan's other novels includeSnow Angels,The Speed Queen, andA Prayer for the Dying. Granta has named him one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Connecticut. ASan Francisco ChronicleBest Book At midnight on Halloween in a cloistered New England suburb, a car carrying five teenagers leaves a winding road and slams into a tree, killing three of them. One escapes unharmed, another suffers severe brain damage. A year later, summoned by the memories of those closest to them, the three who died come back on a last chilling mission among the living. A strange, unsettling, widely celebrated ghost story in the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson,The Night Countrycreeps through the leaf-strewn streets and quiet cul-de-sacs of a bedroom community, reaching into the desperately connected yet isolated lives of the three people changed forever by the accident: Tim, who survived intact but lost everything; Brooks, the cop (first to arrive at the scene of the crash) whose guilty secret has destroyed his life; and Kyle's mom, trying to love the new son the doctors returned to her. As the day wanes and darkness falls, one of them puts a terrible plan into effect, and they find themselves caught in a collision of need and desire, watched over by the three knowing ghosts. At once macabre and moving,The Night Countryelevates every small town's bad high school crash into myth, finding the deeper human truth beneath a shared and very American tragedy. As in his highly prizedSnow AngelsandA Prayer for the Dying, Stewart O'Nan once again gives us an intimate look at people trying to hold on to hope, and at the consequences when they fail. "So many writers and filmmakers have used suburbia as a condescending shorthand for banality and stupidity that it's a pleasure to read a novel that understands both the freedom that suburban life, with cars and hangouts providing mobility and refuge, offers to teenagers, and the way they rail against the constrictions of it. O'Nan's descriptions of this Connecticut town at night, after the strip malls and fast-food places have shut down, capture suburbia as the haunting grounds of teenagers and spooks, both of whom do their roaming after dark . . . [This novel is] the work of a sensitive writer with a genuine talent for investigating the plainness of everyday life with straightforward lyricism."Charles Taylor,The New York Times Book Review "A fascinating ghost story . . . O'Nan does in 229 pages what it takes most horror novelists volumes to domake a clear point. With one foot in the genre of horror/supernatural and the other in literary fiction, this book defies classification . . . The writing style is eerily intimate and crackles without distracting the reader . . . O'Nan reveals his talent for understatement and concision of thought here. The final events really start in the beginning of the book, but gather momentum as the story progresses. Light on plot and character, the novelist establishes the mood and atmosphere in unique style. The inexorability of the ending comes effortlessly but grippingly. At no point in this compact book does the author ever let the pace sag by padding the story or through woolly philosophizing. It is very difficult to put down. [Once finished,The Night Count

Stewart O'Nan's novels include Snow Angels and A Prayer for the Dying. He lives in Connecticut.

"I think that if you haven't read Stewart O'Nan . . . you have some catching up to do."
--Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
"With one foot in the genre of horror-supernatural and the other in literary fiction, this book defies classification."
--Brian Richard Boylan, San Francisco Chronicle
"Chilling...By juxtaposing the angst of teenage years with the hoarier dread of middle age, O'Nan has put his finger on how frightening and swift is the hand of fate."
--John Freeman, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Stewart O'Nan is a literary ventriloquist. Each of his novels is is so different that he seems capable of doing anything he chooses."
--Dan Cryer, Newsday