Mr. Splitfoot

Title:

Mr. Splitfoot

Author:

Hunt, Samantha, author.

Personal Author:

Hunt, Samantha, author.

ISBN:

9780544526709

Physical Description:

322 pages ; 22 cm

Abstract:

A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women -- Ruth (a scam-artist foster kid), and, decades later, Cora (her pregnant niece) -- as they march, each in her own time, toward a mysterious reckoning.

Subject Term:

Family secrets -- Fiction.

Genre:

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION HUNT	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION HUNT	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.

Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who -- or what -- has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road? In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa. Making good on the extraordinary acclaim for her previous books, Samantha Hunt continues to be "dazzling" ( Vanity Fair ) and to deliver fiction that is "daring and delicious" ( Chicago Tribune ).

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Foster children, abandoned houses, and craters left by meteorites weave together a strange and frightening ghost story. In Hunt's surreal third novel (The Invention of Everything Else, 2008, etc.), 17-year-olds Nat and Ruth cleave to each other at The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission in upstate New York. Nat's "ability" to talk to the dead catches the attention of Mr. Bell, a con man, who convinces them to take their show on the road. A strange man offers to buy Ruth from her fanatical foster father, but Ruth gets Mr. Bell to marry her instead, creating a series of fraught and unsettling triangular relationships. Fourteen years later, Cora, Ruth's heavily pregnant niece, stumbles through woods and along highways, following her now mute and enigmatic aunt without understanding why. Wry, absurd, and occasionally silly humor punctures the weighty themes of motherhood, aging, and loss. "We're the Society for Confusing Literature and the Real Lies," a woman explains to Cora at an event on the Erie Canal in which Captain Ahab and Huck Finn compete with Lord Nelson and a German U-boat. Apparent non sequiturs pepper the dialogue throughout, and while at first they give the story a stilted quality, the seemingly random details soon stitch together into a larger meaning. Cora's pregnancy is a natural metaphor for bridging the tiny with the universal, and the novel is rife with chewy metaphors and similes that require careful parsing. At times, the novel's murky obscurity may be vexinga passage featuring a tight-lipped runaway nun is particularly gnomicbut the drip of information and layers of potent imagery keep the pages turning. A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.