“In Rock’s latest novel, a father and daughter try to come to grips with a horrifying event from the past, with the threshold between life and death never far behind.”
While camping with her father Benjamin at Mount Rainier National Park, eleven-year-old Helen disappears into the wilderness. After being missing for a nerve-wracking week, Helen is finally found and returned back to her family.
Twenty-five years later, Helen and Benjamin reunite in Portland, Oregon after nearly two decades of estrangement. They struggle to understand what happened to Helen those days she went missing so long ago. Benjamin meets a woman and a young boy who want to help him learn more about the time when Helen was gone. They send him on a strange journey, leading to possession, a murder house, and a bone-filled lake known as Sad Clown Lake.
The lake can only be found by getting lost, and it’s never in the same place twice.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Peter Rock’s fiction is renowned over the world and often falls into that liminal area of fiction tinged with the strange and uncanny. Rock is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award, among others, and is the author of Spells, The Shelter Cycle, Klickitat, The Bewildered, The Night Swimmers, Carnival Wolves, This Is the Place, and My Abandonment (adapted as Leave No Trace) as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. In Rock’s latest novel, a father and daughter try to come to grips with a horrifying event from the past, with the threshold between life and death never far behind. Publishers Weekly calls Passersthrough “… an eerie account of the attempted reconciliation between an estranged father and daughter … Rock draws on the mountain scenery to create a surreal atmosphere, culminating in a haunting scene of disaster.”
Releasing 19 April 2022 from Soho Press, Passersthrough by Peter Rock is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA
