Only One of These Swerves Works
Tuesday, August 11 stacks five writers with real followings onto one shelf, and the pattern in it should make a loyal reader nervous. Téa Obreht, who took the Orange Prize at 25, has written a book nested inside a book, set in a Wyoming ghost town. Hannah Whitten, who built two bestselling fantasy series, has published a cosmic horror novel about something hungry under the sea. Richard Russo, the patient chronicler of dying upstate towns, has written something that moves like a thriller. Chang-rae Lee has gone back to the Korean-American childhood he started with in 1994. Only Karin Slaughter is doing precisely what you would expect of her.
The case for staying home
Under the Falls (Knopf, 256 pages) sends a musician named Tyler Sinclair back to his upstate New York hometown for a benefit concert, where old friction with a childhood friend, paralyzed years earlier, curdles into suspicious deaths. Kirkus found the problem straight away: a darker, faster-moving narrative than usual, it wrote, gives the characters "less time and space to bloom in our hearts."
Russo's own afterword explains why. The novel began life as a television pilot that did not survive the writers strike. He did not choose thriller pacing, the book inherited it from a different medium, and the unhurried character work that won him the 2002 Pulitzer for Empire Falls is what got squeezed out to make room.
The case for burning the lane down
Reliquary is the opposite story. Hannah Whitten wrote five fantasy novels across two New York Times bestselling series, from For the Wolf to The Foxglove King, and then sold a standalone horror novel. That distinction is the whole argument. Nobody handed her this genre and nothing about her sales required her to want it. Her Orbit editor, Brit Hvide, bought it inside a three-book deal and treated the range itself as the point, saying that whatever Whitten is working on she "raises the bar with her gorgeous, atmospheric writing."
The book is gothic and it is wet. Claire is invited to a three-day wake for her fiancé Elias at Harrow Point, his family's island estate. Orphaned as a child, she wants to be taken in more than she will admit. Then she learns what the family keeps, and what keeps feeding beneath the water.
What makes it convincing is that the apparatus is complete rather than borrowed. Kirkus runs the checklist and finds Whitten "has assembled all the essentials for a gothic novel": the isolated and endangered heroine, the family secrets that will not stay hidden. Booklist puts it in front of "readers of gothics with immersive settings and intense dread." The Nerd Daily scored it 9 out of 10 and reached past the genre shelf to Lovecraft. The novelist Rachel Gillig, blurbing it, went with "Hannah Whitten was born to write horror!"
A writer visiting a genre borrows two or three of its moves and leaves the rest. Whitten brought all of them.
The two that complicate it
Sunrise (Random House, 336 pages) is Obreht's swing, and it is structural rather than territorial. She already wrote the American West once, in Inland. What is new is the machinery: three narratives spread across a hundred years, a book nested inside the book. In 2024, Nina survives a plane crash and walks into an impossibly preserved, entirely abandoned Old West settlement. In 2003, the town historian has his account of the place pulled apart by a writer who turns up asking questions. In 1902, the founder Anton Vargas leads a search for a missing boy while sitting on secrets of his own.
The verdicts split hard, which is the honest signal here. The starred Kirkus review, quoted on the jacket, says it "delivers a virtuoso performance." The Boston Globe, reviewing it last Wednesday, August 5, found the prose overwritten (a waitress arrives as "one of those gum-cudding, Shakespeare resistant entities") and argued the strands should have been developed separately rather than fused into what it called a Frankenstein's monster.
Chang-rae Lee is the quiet counter-argument to all of it. A Tender Age (Riverhead, 368 pages) sits with Jeon-Gi remembering himself at ten in 1976, a Korean-American boy in an apartment complex north of New York City, bullied hard enough that he brings a knife to school and is sent to a church summer camp. That is the territory of Native Speaker, his 1994 debut. But Lee did leave the lane in 2014, for the dystopian Baltimore of On Such a Full Sea, and came back carrying more than he took. Kirkus calls the result "a melancholy, emotionally rich story of preadolescent struggles."
The one to buy
Reliquary. Not the Pulitzer winner, not the Orange Prize winner, not the reliable professional. It is the only one of the four departures where nobody is hedging, and the only one where the author went hunting for the new thing instead of being handed it.
Sunrise may well be the better novel, and if you loved Inland read it regardless, but a starred review plus a serious pan means paying $29 for a coin flip. The Secrets We Hide is the safest book of the day and the worst place to start, being the second North Falls novel. Under the Falls I would skip, and Kirkus more or less agrees: it closes by steering you toward his North Bath novels and Straight Man instead.
Which is useful, because the backlist is what you can start tonight. For Russo, his second novel The Risk Pool, early and unhurried and doing everything Under the Falls is too rushed to do. For Obreht, The Tiger's Wife, the debut that took the Orange Prize. For Lee, On Such a Full Sea. And for Slaughter, skip the series and take a standalone: The Good Daughter, or Pretty Girls if you want the mean one.
