Reviews
“…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 Magazine
“Lee Polevoi has an eye for detail and the requisite intoxication with language to make this novel well worth reading.”
—Smarter Company
“Like the darkly comedic aesthetic presented by Joel and Ethan Coen, directors of among other films ‘Fargo,’ ‘Blood Simple,’ ‘The Big Lebowski,’ and ‘Miller’s Crossing’
—Rancho Santa Fe Review.
Book Description
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.
Before he can even unpack, Parker goes head-to-head with his relatives—his tyrannical stepfather, seething younger brother, newly evangelical mother, and his alluring younger half-sister Rita—and with the demons they never exorcised.
Delicately but disastrously, Parker attempts to keep his family from imploding, unaware that they have their own plans for escape. 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. Now available on Kindle, Nook and iBooks.
Praise
“Lee Polevoi has created an entire world, a world full of surprises, by turns harrowing and darkly funny. His prose reveals a true gift for language, and a deep dedication to craft. Beneath it all is Polevoi’s knack for telling a story, which is, after all, the powerful engine that pushes this novel forward page by page.”
—Gerald Shapiro, author of Little Men
“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
“I read The Moon in Deep Winter during a transcontinental flight, but left the last 20 pages for the next morning, because up to that point, it filled me with such dread that I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. It is a wonderful achievement, a page turner, and beautifully written.”
—John Kretchmer, director of “Burn Notice”