The Year of the Storm

April 22, 2013
Danny, the 29-year-old main narrator of Mantooth’s gripping first novel with supernatural overtones, has a painful story to tell his therapist. When he was 14, his mother and little sister, Anna, disappeared from their rural Alabama home during a violent storm. After nine months of exhaustive searching, there was still no trace of the two. All signs pointed to his mother, who is disturbed and unhappy, voluntarily leaving home with Anna. But was there a connection with the chilling case of two local girls missing since the early 1960s? Enter second narrator Walter Pike, a reclusive and erratic Vietnam vet, who was also 14 at the time Danny’s mother and sister vanished. Walter told Danny some unsettling stories, which Danny ultimately put to the test. Did Danny find a parallel universe? Were Danny and Walter both delusional? This eerie novel can be as mesmerizing as a campfire tale, despite some awkward transitions between past and present. Agent: Beth Fleisher, Clear Sailing Creatives.

June 1, 2013
It's been months since Danny's mother and sister mysteriously disappeared into the woods. The anxious stasis of Danny's life is interrupted by filthy, chain-smoking, oxygen tanktoting Walter Pike, who appears on the doorstep saying he might know what happened to them. In an alternate story line narrated by Pike, we learn a tale from his youth, when the teenage Walter befriended an outcast, Seth, who escaped bullies by taking refuge in an underground storm shelter in the forest. It was via this shelter that Seth learned to slipto somehow travel to a strange swamp landscape where two girls missing from town seemed to continue to exist. Walter thinks Danny's mother and sister may be in that same nether-swamp, but the time to find them is growing short. Yes, it takes a bit of effort to keep the similar story lines straight, but Mantooth's masterful foreshadowing creates a need to know even when the stakes are lessened by the fantasy element. A tough and violent book, but also one with prose that aches with loss.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)