Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2022
320 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
An English teacher is gaslit by his charismatic high school bully in this tense story of deception, manipulation, and murder.
Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water's edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years but now seems overjoyed to have "run into" his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night?
What follows is a fast-paced story of obsession and cunning. As Jack invades Todd's life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present. Set in a small town on the New England coast, Conner Habib's debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict. Both gruesome and tender, Hawk Mountain offers a compelling look at how love and hate are indissoluble, intertwined until the last breath.
"The tension is palpable on every page, and Habib skillfully illustrates the complexity of relationships and the pain of unmet desires, both queer and otherwise...A brutal and gorgeous tale of manipulation, control, and desire." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Unresolved emotional conflict from adolescence haunts a man in Habib's intensely unsettling debut...Habib brings rich psychological insight to his characters, expertly observing how the conflicts of youth persist into Todd and Jack's present. Though not for the squeamish, this dramatic tale soars." - Publishers Weekly
"Tender, horrifying, utterly transfixing." - Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
"A deeply disturbing yet, somehow, soaring novel I won't soon forget. It plumbs the depths of traumatized characters trapped within our damaging culture. I couldn't look away, even when I was looking from between my fingers." - Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Pallbearers Club
"The opening lines of Hawk Mountain plummet you into an atmosphere of creeping dread and precarious restraint that won't let up until the final, shocking moments." - Caitlin Doughty, bestselling author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
This information about Hawk Mountain was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Conner Habib hosts the podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib, which features conversations with artists, intellectuals, and countercultural figures, and covers topics as wide-ranging as punk rock, philosophy, pornography, and occultism. His nonfiction writing has appeared in multiple online and print magazines. He lives in Ireland. Hawk Mountain is his first novel.
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