For this exceptional and emotionally wrenching novel, Chaon (Await Your Reply) plants the seeds of new manias into the hard, unforgiving ground that will be familiar to his readers. In 1983, when psychologist Dustin Tillman was 13, his mother, father, aunt, and uncle were murdered. Dustin accused his adopted older brother, Rusty, a sadistic kid attracted to Satanism, of the crime, and Rusty was incarcerated. The murders shaped Dustin's life as much as they did Rusty's; his Ph.D. dissertation was on Satanic ritual abuse, and he practices hypnotherapy despite its detractors. Now in his early 40s, he's an ineffectual father of two boys and an oblivious husband to a dying wife in suburban Ohio. Having convinced himself of his vision of the past and clinging only to "memories of happiness," he's unnerved to learn that Rusty has been exonerated and released. What he doesn't know is that Rusty has reached out to Dustin's youngest, Aaron, a teenage junky sliding into Cleveland's dangerous underground, urging the boy to talk to Wave, Dustin's estranged cousin, who may know the truth of the murders. The paths of several characters converge as one of Dustin's patients convinces him to investigate a spate of drownings and Aaron's best friend Rabbit is pulled from the river, dead. With impressive skill, across multiple narratives that twine, fracture, and reset, Chaon expertly realizes his singular vision of American dread. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

At 15 hours to find out whodunit (you'll probably guess early), howdunit (you'll need to wait for it), whydunit (well...? no spoilers!), we're talking commitment. A full cast (why don't producers reveal who's who?), including veterans Ari Fliakos and -Edoardo Ballerini, with Scott Aiello, -Michael Crouch, and Alex McKenna, keep the pace brisk, even as the characters ruminate a bit too long on unnecessary details. Impatience aside, the premise is intriguing: Dustin Tillman, a fortysomething psychologist on suburban cruise control, is jolted by the news that older brother Rusty has been DNA--exonerated from his life sentence after 30 years in prison. Already a troubled teen when the Tillman family adopted him, Rusty was convicted of the gruesome murders of their parents, an aunt, and an uncle-and now he's getting out. Meanwhile, current reports of murder have been haunting Dustin on the job as one of his clients, a former cop, presents a hard-to-ignore theory that a serial killer is targeting college boys. Caught between past and present crimes, Dustin's life heads toward implosion. VERDICT Despite an aurally convincing cast, Chaon's (Among the Missing) latest proves to be more meandering mess than mesmerizing mystery. ["Chaon creates a world of tragedy, disease, and drug abuse right out of today's news and makes it real while keeping readers guessing on many levels": LJ 2/1/17 starred review of the Ballantine hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, by Colson Whitehead. (Anchor, $16.95.) Whitehead's boldly inventive novel follows Cora, a slave in Georgia making her escape to freedom on a literal underground railroad. As she encounters horror after horror, the story trains an eye on aspects of black history too often co-opted by white narrators. This book, one of the Book Review's 10 best of 2016, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017. CANNIBALISM: A Perfectly Natural History, by Bill Schutt. (Algonquin, $16.95.) It wasn't just the Donner party. Cannibalism is often the rule, not the exception, for many species. Schutt's breezy tone helps keep disgust at bay, and the book is full of surprising detail: In China, for example, elites during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) regularly feasted on humans, and the practice continued well into the late 1960s. A PIECE OF THE WORLD, by Christina Baker Kline. (William Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Kline imagines the inner life of the woman with polio crawling across a desolate field in Andrew Wyeth's iconic painting, "Christina's World." "Both painter and writer have a fine-grained feel for the setting," our reviewer, Becky Aikman, wrote. "Christina's yearning, her determination, her will to dream, occupy the emotional center in both the novel and the painting." PHENOMENA: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigation Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, by Annie Jacobsen. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) For decades, the military has tried to harness the supernatural - to find hostages, for example, or to read foreign governments' minds. Jacobsen's account is full of entertaining anecdotes; she catalogs the seers, the spoon-benders and the researchers who administered ESP tests to plants, all funded in the interest of national security. ILL WILL, by Dan Chaon. (Ballantine, $17.) This dark literary thriller deals with recovered memories, satanistic ritual and childhood trauma. Dustin, a psychologist in his 40s, is grappling with a tragic past: His parents, aunt and uncle were murdered and his adopted brother, Rusty, was convicted of the crime. But new DNA evidence helped overturn the ruling, and Rusty's exoneration stirs up long-repressed guilt and fear. MY UTMOST: A Devotional Memoir, by Macy Halford. (Vintage, $17.) "My Utmost for His Highest," a book loved by evangelicals, was central to Halford's faith when she was growing up. Years later, as her beliefs shifted, she investigated the book's origins and its author, Oswald Chambers. Her memoir is both a mediation on "a complicated nostalgia" for the faith of her childhood and an intellectual biography of Chambers.

In his first novel in seven years, National Book Award finalist Chaon has created another of those twilight realms of which he is an indisputable master (see the story collection Stay Awake, 2012). The book's characters plumb the depths of deception and surpass all established measures of instability and dysfunction. They grapple so ineffectively with issues of loss, grief, displacement, or mere hormonal confusion that they simultaneously contribute to and feed off of shared delusions and imminent peril. Told in many voices through the past and into the present We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves the story runs on two tracks: a family massacre for which an adopted son was falsely imprisoned at the height of the 1980s satanic-cult mania, and an ongoing string of urban legend-like drowning deaths involving drunken college boys. If the definition of eeriness is indeed strange, suspicious, and unnatural, the definers of the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, et al.) have a worthy heir in Dan Chaon.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2017 Booklist