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A stark, incendiary novel about two sisters seeking refuge with a reclusive cult in the Adirondacks: a parable of power and how it is claimed, wielded—and how it transforms.
On a summer evening in 1952, young sisters Zina and Presendia run hand-in-hand into the wooded hills of upstate New York, fleeing their family farmhouse as it collapses into flames.
Deep in the Adirondack mountains, they encounter a scruffy band of “settlers” occupying a dilapidated sportsmen’s complex nestled along a secluded mountain lake. The girls soon become inculcated in the spiritual training and rustic hedonism of this isolated utopian community, led by its profane but visionary founder: a rough-necked charismatic named Peter.
Singled out for her erudition and steely temper, Zina is tasked with codifying Peter’s message in writing—a testament intended to rouse the masses, prophesying the rise of a new consciousness from the ashes of a decadent and hypocritical postwar American society.
As ghosts from Zina’s violent past resurface, and the construction of a major highway extension accelerates Peter’s anarchic agenda, she must choose between turning her back on her new life and adopted flock, or seizing the power she so desires and joining Peter in the great cataclysm to come.
A haunting, strikingly vivid depiction of an isolated world, power and its reproductions, and the forgotten, darker side of postwar American life, The Damagers is a magnetic, unsettling opus from an exciting literary talent.
