Praise for Lee Polevoi’s debut novel,
The Moon in Deep Winter
When Parker Sloane returns from a dismal foray into third-world cash-smuggling to his childhood home in the woods of New England, it seems he’s seeing his country and his blended stepfamily for the first time—and finding both just as twitchy, desperate, paranoid, and unpredictable as the underworld types he thought he’d escaped.
The Moon in Deep Winter combines the dark comedy of the Coen brothers with the doomed lyricism of Denis Johnson, creating an airtight world of homicidal family dysfunction.
“…the story is irresistible … Polevoi is a master of scene setting … the author keeps his narrative threads straight and sculpts his characters with exquisite precision, never allowing their intrinsic strangeness to become distractingly grotesque.”
Foreword Reviews
“Lee Polevoi’s impressive debut novel, The Moon in Deep Winter is the story of a misguided homecoming gone wrong…Polevoi does a masterful job weaving a complex family web of half-truth, paranoia, and barely subdued violence…Within the world of The Moon in Deep Winter, what is most familiar is also the most strange, and what would seem at first glance to be most wholesome soon becomes most suspect. This is a book populated not by heroes and villains, but by humans—with all of their flaws and selfish designs. As in Thomas Berger’s Neighbors and Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, Parker and the other characters in The Moon in Deep Winter are all forced to confront one universal and unsavory truth: that all of their values, all of their dreams, and all of their loyalties, are nothing in the face of their need for self-preservation.”
Fiction Writers Review
“This beautifully-crafted vision of American homecoming near the end of the millennium is extremely funny and highly unsettling. Lee Polevoi shows us what a truly fragile set of alliances make a family, and what absurdity, intrigue and violence results when it crumbles, its better nature fails at last, and its dark side grabs the wheel. A wonderful debut!”
Michael Pritchett, author of The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis
“Lee Polevoi’s arresting first novel begins as a familiar tale of a young man returning to visit the family from whom he’s become estranged, but quickly turns dark, almost hallucinatory. Part thriller, part Faulkner-esque gothic, The Moon in Deep Winter suggests that while you can go home again, you probably shouldn’t.”
Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
