Sacrificial animals : a novel / Kailee Pedersen.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up alongside her family's farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology.

The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever.

But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia's interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

Punctuated by scenes from Nick's adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

DEBUT Nick Morrow is 43, living in New York City, and working as a literary critic. This life is a far cry from his childhood spent in the shadow of a cruel father on a 1,000-acre family farm in Nebraska. When his father reaches out to let Nick know he is dying, Nick encourages his estranged brother Joshua (who was disowned when he married Emilia, a woman of Chinese descent) to join him on a trip back home. Told from Nick's point of view across two timeframes, the present and when he was 13, this novel presents a contemplatively paced supernatural horror tale, centering family, trauma, and revenge, with unease infused into every detail. Readers will follow Nick as the foreboding details build, knowing full well that the tightly coiled tension will eventually explode; when it does, they will be left gasping in awe. VERDICT Pedersen's debut skillfully balances character and atmosphere. Recommend to readers who like creepy, methodically paced stories that focus on unease, such as the work of Kevin Brockmeier. Also a good pick for those who enjoy tales that use mythology in a revenge plot, like The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.

Publishers Weekly Review

The mythic Chinese figure of the nine-tailed fox spirit goes Midwestern Gothic in Pederson's unsettling debut, which tracks the rise and fall of the Morrow family of Stag's Crossing, a 1,000-acre farm in Nebraska. The narrative toggles between "then" and "now." "Then" follows the three Morrow men--father Carlyle, older son Joshua, and youngest son Nick--as they hunt a deer and a fox after killing the fox's cubs. In the sections labeled "now," Carlyle is dying of bone cancer and hopes to reconcile with his sons, who have become estranged after Carlyle disowned Joshua for marrying Emilia, an Asian woman with a mysterious past. As Joshua is drawn back to the farm, Nick, now a jaded literary critic, develops an intense fascination with Emilia. The two timelines come together in an unexpected and clever way, leading to a supernatural and bloody denouement. The close third-person narration stays mainly on Nick, whose mind proves unpleasant and unsettling to spend so much time inside, but this will be a feature, not a bug, to readers of grisly, literary horror that isn't afraid to show its teeth. Pedersen is sure to win fans. Agent: Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Aug)

Booklist Review

Pedersen's debut is a slow-burning horror story that escalates to a hair-raising, twisty finale. The narrative centers on Nick Morrow, a self-proclaimed misunderstood man stuck in his tragic past. After receiving a call from his ailing father, he returns with his older brother, Joshua, to Stag's Crossing in rural Nebraska hoping for a reconciliation. Joshua, the prodigal son, quickly resumes the role of golden boy, freeing up his younger sibling and beautiful wife, Eleanor, to engage in risky flirtations. Unbeknown to the Morrow men, everything is interconnected, starting with Nick's hesitant participation in his dad's bloody cruelties, his childhood quest to trap an unnerving fox, and the disinheritance sparked by his racist dad and Asian sister-in-law. Nick's ruminations read like a saga that unfurls into a distressing yet muted fairy tale peppered with Chinese mythology. Pedersen provides a brilliant and unforgiving commentary on toxic masculinity and racism, the fatal flaw that results in the dissolution of a midwestern family. What begins as a man's chilling recollections evolves into a sinister lesson on trauma and violent retribution.

Kirkus Book Review

A Nebraska family's unquenchable violence is interrupted, then accelerated, by a femme fatale. This incantatory debut builds menace from its opening phrase: "Moonlight slashes open the boy's face." The boy, Nick Morrow, is indeed menaced--and beaten--by father and brother; mom is killed off in childbirth in the second paragraph. Nick is trapped on his family's "one thousand acres of rich loam atop the Ogallala Aquifer," a place called Stag's Crossing, thanks to the stag's head perched on the front gate. It's just the first decapitation featured in this grisly and relentlessly readable horror story. The author toggles 40 staccato chapters, each titled "Then" or "Now," shifting between Nick's adolescence and an excruciating time three decades later. The patriarch, Carlyle Morrow, possessing "a violence keen and beautiful as the silver curve of a fishhook," has engineered a ruse to bring home his two estranged middle-aged sons. The favored older, Joshua, brings Emilia, his "high-strung, unintimidated" Asian American wife; Joshua's choice of her ruptured Carlyle's hold on his offspring. Now, thanks to the shocking and unnatural nature of Emilia, the Morrow patrimony of cruelty, wielded "with an ancient and primeval ecstasy," will climax. And when it does, the author--who was adopted from Nanning, China, onto a Nebraska farm--is merciless. She writes with a rare acuity, bending her language toward fable, salting it with words like "demesne," "eidolon," and "sinfonietta." She is excellent at blurring the animal and human, even as her unbroken tone lacks the quotidian details that can relieve and ratchet horror. Still, few readers are likely to quit before the final chapter, "Then & Now." An assured and bloody fable heralds the arrival of a gifted new voice attuned to ancient modes of damnation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.