JACKALOPE

A teen leaves his suburban life to go off the grid with his father, who struggles with mental illness.

When his parents divorce, 16-year-old Mark is uprooted from Los Angeles to live in bland Wheaton, Illinois, with his ultrareligious mother and her fundamentalist boyfriend, Ted, an aspiring pastor. Mark, who’s only out as gay to select people, feels alone and stifled under the thumb of Ted’s draconian piety. Mark’s philosophy professor father, who has only visitation rights, relocates to Chicago to be near him. One day, Dad invites Mark to leave behind the life he hates and move with him to the California wilderness. The pair settle in a crude but well-stocked cabin deep in the woods. Mark’s father has a complicated history of mental illness that includes psychosis and various personality disorders, leaving Mark to question the meaning of his own visions of people, like the Shadow Man. When a terrible accident confines his dad to bed rest, Mark must keep them both alive through a grueling winter, enduring dwindling food supplies and the relentless stress of isolation and environmental dangers. Dunn’s debut is a knockout, taking adventure and psychological thriller tropes and turning them on their heads. Mark’s struggle to survive is brutal and pulse-pounding in and of itself and magnified by his doubts about what is real. This work is shocking, wholly original, and not to be missed. Main characters are cued white.

Intensely riveting; demands to be read in a single sitting.