The Singing Bone

Hahn’s debut novel time-hops between the year 2000, when filmmaker Hans Loomis is prepping a documentary on Jack Wyck, a charismatic cult leader whose rabid followers have increased during his 20-year imprisonment for murder, and 1977 in upstate New York, where Wyck seduces the story’s protagonist, 17-year-old high school student Alice Pearson, and many of her friends. The frequent shifts in chronology, with flashbacks taken from several points of view, are identified by headings, but reader Huber clarifies them even more by developing voices that match the main characters as they age. Her teen Alice’s girlishness as she meets, loves, and eventually aids in jailing Wyck is recognizably transformed into a thoughtful 37-year-old version whose quiet, incognito life as a folklore professor is threatened by the documentary. Wyck’s smarmy, seductive whisper, which lured the kids into sharing his farmhouse and lifestyle, is more relaxed and casual two decades later with Hans, but quickly resurfaces when he sees the filmmaker’s female assistant. Huber’s performance covers this exquisitely stitched novel’s full array of emotions—from blissful joy to fury—along with dreamy drug sequences and the surprising murder that rests uneasily at its heart. A Regan Arts hardcover. (Mar.)