YOU DON'T BELONG HERE

In Harper’s debut literary novel, a writer’s trip to an artsy town becomes an interminable nightmare.

For the past week, aspiring writer Morris Hines has been staying (and drinking) at the Manderlay Colony, an artists residence where he’d hoped to make some headway on his fantasy novel. Now, on his last night in town before returning home to Washington, D.C., and his fiancee, Yasmin, Morris has wandered into the Public House, a dive bar with no signage, patronized mostly by locals. There, he runs into Henry, an old friend from college whom Morris has not seen for a decade. Morris’ history with Henry is complex, and he isn’t thrilled to run into him—especially given how run-down Henry looks, with a puffy face and burns on his hands. A townwide electrical blackout provides Morris an opportunity to escape the bar before the past can be dredged up, but he misses his flight the next morning and can’t get a new one for two more days. This unintended extension of his off-season stay in the small town promises additional drunken nights and additional run-ins with Henry and his hard-living crowd. Will Morris be able to put his old ghosts to rest, or will a series of bad decisions leave him as broken as Henry? The author’s prose is breezy and straightforward, as when the bisexual Morris describes his days rooming with the gay Henry: “Sometimes they had sex, but most times, they didn’t. It became a little transaction between them, a ‘help me out’ moment when there was an itch that needed scratching. They rarely discussed it except to instruct in what they liked. After all, there was no point in stretching it out longer than it needed to be.” The mood is all over the place—sometimes menacing, sometimes comic, sometimes melodramatic—and the plot is not entirely convincing. Even so, Harper manages to capture the dislocation of a certain type of drinking binge, wherein the present starts to resemble a fun-house mirror of the past.

A claustrophobic novel about destructive friends and destructive urges.