The Storm King

December 1, 2017
A doctor returns to his hometown to confront the violence and trauma of his adolescence.Nate McHale grew up in a picturesque lake town in the Adirondacks. One weekend in April when Nate is a teen, his family heads out for a picnic, and a drunk driver runs their car off a mountain road into the freezing lake below. Nate is the only survivor, but the incident doesn't leave him unscathed; instead, it sets him on a dangerous path. Together with a group of friends, Nate acts on his "unquenchable rage" by engaging in escalating acts of vandalism designed to punish anyone in town who has wronged him or his friends. But then one of their gang, a girl with whom Nate has a complicated history, disappears. Fourteen years later, Nate, now a successful surgeon in New York with a wife and daughter, gets a call that the girl's body has been pulled from the lake, clearly the victim of murder. As Nate returns home and the remaining gang reunites, they realize that someone is committing acts that mirror their youthful transgressions--and that this someone is upping the ante. Duffy (House of Echoes, 2015) alternates between Nate's return home in the present and his vengeful past. Even readers with a high tolerance for leaps back and forth in time, though, might be stymied by Duffy's convoluted double narrative. It doesn't help matters that while Duffy seems to want his book to be a page-turner, he frequently slows the pace with overwriting. But while readers may skim past some sentences, Duffy's portrait of Nate, especially in his adolescence, feels like a truthful mess of contradictions and complexity--in other words, he feels like a real person grappling with trauma and quotidian confusions all at once.A muddy thriller with an intriguing protagonist at its core.

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Starred review from December 18, 2017
Duffy follows his debut, House of Echoes, with a stunning literary thriller, which combines accomplished wordsmithing with startling twists. Nate McHale is a husband, father, and pediatric surgeon in New York City, but he was once the Storm King of Greystone Lake in upstate New York, the leader of a band of vengeful vandals. Under cover of bad weather, Nate and his high school friends balanced “the equations of pain” by committing acts
of retribution for attacks and sleights against them. Nate’s high school girlfriend, Lucy Bennett, disappeared just after graduation. Now Lucy’s body has recently been found, and Nate is returning to Greystone Lake for the first time in 14 years for her funeral. He must tame the “menagerie of suffering in the cages of soul” in order to fight his way through the layers of secrets, past and present, as a hurricane rages and a new wave of vandalism even more vicious than his own strikes the town. Duffy weaves Lucy’s murder and town folklore into a tapestry of storm, pain, fire, and, eventually, redemption. Agent: Elisabeth Weed, Weed Literary.

Starred review from December 1, 2017
Lucy Bennett was missing for 14 years until tourists found her body in the headlands of Greystone Lake in the Adirondacks. Nate McHale, Lucy's high-school boyfriend, returns home thinking he's prepared for the funeral and homicide investigation. To the town that loves its stories, Nate is The Boy Who Fell: the miraculous survivor of the drunk-driving accident that killed his family. To his friends, Nate will always be the Thunder King: a vengeful teen exacting retribution from Greystone Lake's abusers with elaborate plots that he and his friends executed during thunderstorms. Nate prefers to think of himself as a man who has transcended tragedy to become a husband, father, and pediatric oncological surgeon. But proof that you can't escape the past hits hard in the form of a new generation of copycat vandals launching violent attacks of their own. Greystone Lake, always hungry for a new story, is abuzz with speculation that the vandals are vindicating Lucy's murder. In one night, everything changes: one of the vandals Nate tangled with is murdered, Lucy's incriminating journals are found, and Nate's past is tied to the town's darkest tale. An elaborately layered, creepily atmospheric story that blends haunting legends and the psychological terror of a murderer on the hunt. A winning thriller sure to draw readers of Jennifer McMahon, Ruth Ware, and Michael Koryta.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2017

A devoted family man and pediatric cancer specialist, Nate McHale was once "the Storm King," a boiling-with-rage teenager leading friends on missions to punish anyone who's crossed them. Now a body has been discovered near their Adirondack town, and secrets from their past are coming out. Duffy's debut, House of Echoes, has been optioned for film.

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