THAT TIME OF YEAR

A Parisian family that summers each year in a small village learns the hard way they have overstayed their welcome in this deeply unsettling and slippery novella.

On Sept. 1, Herman embarks on a search for his wife, Rose, and their son, who had gone to the neighboring farmhouse to pick up eggs and not returned. Never having stayed past the end of August before, he is shocked by the sudden turn in the weather from sunny and temperate to cold and rainy literally overnight, a pathetic fallacy and our first introduction to the village as a character of menacing proportions, populated by disturbing residents, all of whom slide sideways around Herman’s ever increasing anxiety in charming, yet frighteningly empty, ways. When he seeks out the village’s mayor to tell him what's going on, he meets Alfred, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who turns out to be a former Parisian who also once stayed past summer’s end. Alfred takes Herman on as a project, vowing to turn him into a local, and sets Herman on a path where he must find a way to withstand the unending gray, stormy landscape or simply melt away. As he attempts to navigate the village’s internal politics and strangely archaic rituals with Alfred’s help, he falls helplessly into its life as if tumbling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, his urgency slowly transforming to inert apathy. When he finally learns what happened to his wife and child, he ends up with more questions than answers. Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style, this slim, sleek story has a veneer of sly sophistication that belies the horror of malignancy within the village and Herman himself.

Part ghost story, part satiric horror, this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.