The Midnight Club

Four friends relive a tragic event from their college years in this taut and introspective time-travel thriller from Harrison (Only She Came Back). In 1989 at Dunstan College in Vermont, five members of the school’s literary magazine staff—self-conscious Byron, quiet artist Jennet, outsider Sonia, intellectual Paul, and rowdy Auraleigh—form the Midnight Brunch Club, staying up late drinking and eating Auraleigh’s sumptuous omelets. All are disturbed by an anonymous article in the magazine titled “The Warning,” which declares, “What’s going to kill us is that we can’t stop looking backwards.” Soon thereafter, Jennet drowns under mysterious circumstances. The resulting grief, fear, and guilt put the surviving club members on a path to disappointing adulthoods, marred by broken marriages, wanderlust, and faulty memories about Jennet’s death. In 2014, Auraleigh invites the gang to her bed & breakfast near the college to drink the mysterious “elixir of the pines,” which will enable them to travel back to the past to learn once and for all whether Jennet’s death was suicide, an accident, or murder, and in the process figure out where their lives went wrong. Harrison meticulously weaves flashbacks, elaborate time-travel twists, and the perspectives of each main character into a suspenseful saga about regret and missed opportunities. This deserves to be savored. Agent: Jessica Sinsheimer, Context Literary. (Sept.)