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A brooding, lyrical story about the preciousness of life brought to us by the voices of the dead.

Caleb Aldrich, Steven Donovan, Matthew Cardullo, and Leo Ridgeway never met until the afterlife: four attractive young men who vanish at pivotal moments in their lives, their bodies eventually found in icy rivers across the U.S. Through a vague process they call “summoning,” they are able to share with each other the stories of how they lived and died, creating a fragile companionship in an opaque limbo. “We are those boys they keep finding in the river,” says Matthew, a college wrestling champ whose obsessiveness ruins his relationship with his girlfriend. “I floated alone on the surface of the Huron, trapped between ice and sky…I was terrified, until I heard their voices.” Castellani approaches his characters with deep empathy, tracing their attempts at love and human connection despite frequent bitter disappointments and heartbreaking losses. A true-crime thread runs through the narrative—media and online chatter speculate that the four (and others) are victims of the Smiley Face Killers, a shadowy network of men hunting college-aged boys—but this element ultimately matters far less than the intimate testimonies of the dead and those who loved them. Castellani unfolds each story through a variety of forms—traditional narration, text message threads, emails, media interviews—all of which suggest the brittleness of human communication and how easily meanings can get lost in between the lines. There’s also a touch of the supernatural in this story—a dresser drawer suddenly flung open or the honking horn of a car kept in storage—that shows how the dead create signs of their presence in the physical world. Even though the crime-mystery framing adds some suspense, it’s an unnecessary gimmick next to the moving portraits of lives cut short and lessons learned by the survivors.

Castellani creates a poignant reflection on love and loss in the stories of his lost boys—and the people they’ve left behind.