it's a quirky small town portrait wrapped up in a mystery... patrician connecticut is shaken up when violently hateful letters start appearing in people's mail boxes and perfectly healthy people of all ages begin dying mysteriously. an amazing cast of characters, all wonderfully complicated and conflicted who, without ever seeming saccharine, get their just desserts. it's a hilarious book, but not a comedy, and a sad book, but not a tragedy. and Malone's writing is just dazzling. i just inhaled this book because his prose skips across the page and i just couldn't stop.
the book is set in 1976 and dingley falls is a cross section of old and young, straight laced, hippy, avant garde and precocious, not necessarily where you expect to find it. a wonderful quartet of society matrons finds themselves in an uproar when one runs off with a visiting beat poet. girls on the edge of becoming teens, experimenting, wanting to jump in the convertible but also depending on the advice of the local priest and very close with their fathers. a batty old woman, last in the line of the dingley founding family, who swears she's seeing strange flashes in the forest.
npr has an excerpt here
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