Hawk Mountain: A Novel

by Conner Habib

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Filled with disturbing twists and turns, Connor Habib's debut novel is proof of a thriller writer on the breakout. Be there first with Hawk Mountain.

An English teacher is gaslit by his charismatic high school bully in this tense story of deception, manipulation, and murder. 

Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water’s edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years but now seems overjoyed to have “run into” his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night?

What follows is a fast-paced story of obsession and cunning. As Jack invades Todd’s life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present. Set in a small town on the New England coast, Conner Habib’s debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict. Both gruesome and tender, Hawk Mountain offers a compelling look at how love and hate are indissoluble, intertwined until the last breath.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393542172
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/05/2022
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	25,716
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Conner Habib hosts the podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib, which features conversations with artists, intellectuals, and countercultural figures, and covers topics as wide-ranging as punk rock, philosophy, pornography, and occultism. His nonfiction writing has appeared in multiple online and print magazines. He lives in Ireland. Hawk Mountain is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

05/30/2022

Unresolved emotional conflict from adolescence haunts a man in Habib’s intensely unsettling debut. While at the beach, Todd Nasca, a high school English teacher estranged from his wife and raising his six-year-old son Anthony in a quaint New England town, crosses paths with Jack Gates, a former schoolmate who used to bully Todd. All smiles now, Jack insinuates himself into Todd’s life with disturbing ease, overstaying his welcome to sleep a few nights on Todd’s couch and gradually working his way into Todd and Anthony’s domestic routines. Then Todd finds out Jack answered a call from Todd’s wife without telling him, setting up a confrontation that is spectacularly hideous in its brutality. Habib laces his narrative with references to the books Todd assigns his students about “male bonding and camaraderie,” suggesting unspoken nuances of his relationship with Jack. The narrative also toggles between past and present, building tension en route to the revelation of an unexpected encounter between the two as teenagers that had major consequences on the course of their lives. Habib brings rich psychological insight to his characters, expertly observing how the conflicts of youth persist into Todd and Jack’s present. Though not for the squeamish, this dramatic tale soars. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"A brilliantly disturbing, expertly crafted literary noir that will stick with you long after you put it down. Conner Habib has written a flawless meditation on the fruitless, but eternally human, effort to kill off the parts of ourselves we cannot love—literally and metaphorically. I love this book."

Sara Gran

"Dripping with menace from the first page, this story of childhood enemies meeting up fifteen years later is utterly enthralling.… [C]ompelling, shocking, and beautiful."

Liz Nugent

"Tender, horrifying, utterly transfixing."

Kelly Link

"Hawk Mountain is deft horror, made of precise strikes into our most vulnerable psychic terrain… Finally, a horror story that knows cisheteropatriarchy is the villain!"

Andrea Lawlor

"A moving and unflinching portrayal of a man caught in a trap of his own making, but willing to do almost anything—to almost anybody—if it will keep him from having to face up to himself. Hawk Mountain is a wonderfully bleak and beautifully written debut."

Brian Evenson

"Conner Habib’s debut novel is a bleak, dark adrenaline rush."

Clive Barker

"The opening lines of Hawk Mountain plummet you into an atmosphere of creeping dread and precarious restraint that won’t let up until the final, shocking moments."

Caitlin Doughty

"A deeply disturbing yet, somehow, soaring novel I won’t soon forget. It plumbs the depths of traumatized characters trapped within our damaging culture. I couldn’t look away, even when I was looking from between my fingers."

Paul Tremblay

"Conner Habib writes with [a] hallucinatory precision, and a kind of merciless humanity, about the poisonous work of repression. His forebears—Poe, Highsmith, even classical tragedy—are clear, but his originality is clearer still. Hawk Mountain is a work of strange, glittering darkness."

Mark O’Connell

"This heart-pounding thriller will have readers furiously turning pages…this gorgeous debut affirms [Habib’s] stunning gift for dissecting humanity."

Booklist (starred review)

"[A] mesmerizing debut about the intricacies of the human psyche and the effect of destructive behavior on love… [Habib’s] exploration of the tangled web of human desire, emotions and abuse, and how it becomes a legacy passed down through generations, is gritty and chilling. With haunting prose and deeply atmospheric descriptions, Hawk Mountain is a disturbing descent into the convulsions of the human mind and heart."

BookPage starred review

03/01/2022

In small-town New England, single dad Todd is enjoying the beach with son Anthony when he's approached by someone ominous from the past: Jack, the guy who cruelly bullied him in their teenage years. Jack just wants to catch up, have dinner, and maybe stay the night, then proceeds to shove himself threateningly into Todd's life. From the host of the popular podcast Against Everyone, suggesting that people don't easily change and that the horrors of high school live on. There's TV/film interest.

Library Journal

★ 2022-04-13
The reappearance of a childhood bully throws the life of a New England man into turmoil.

When the book opens, Todd Nasca is spending time on the beach with his 6-year-old son, Anthony. They moved to New Granard four months ago, and soon Todd will start his position as a high school English teacher and Anthony will begin school for the first time. After having kept the boy out of kindergarten, Todd is anxious about his son entering the world; he feels like he's “pushing Anthony off a precipice.” Todd and his wife, Livia, divorced four years ago after a brief and tepid marriage, but Livia is back from her travels in Europe with renewed interest in knowing the son she left behind. Todd is alarmed when a stranger approaches Anthony at the beach—except he turns out to not be a stranger at all. Jack Gates transferred to Todd's high school when both boys were seniors, but they haven’t seen each other in years, and for good reason: Flashbacks detail how Jack viciously bullied Todd, calling him homophobic slurs, threatening him, and alienating Todd from their peers. Underlying the meanness was a tension that has followed both men to the present—a feeling it's possible they've been purposefully avoiding. When Todd presses, Jack is vague about the state of his marriage, how long he plans to stay, or if his sudden reappearance in Todd's life might be more than just coincidence. The longer Jack’s around, the more Todd’s discomfort grows, building to a shocking act of violence that inextricably links the characters and forces Todd down a path of alienation, lies, and madness. The tension is palpable on every page, and Habib skillfully illustrates the complexity of relationships and the pain of unmet desires, both queer and otherwise. His prose is as brutal as it is profound and beautiful: “Is everyone unhappy? Is everyone stuck? I think, Jack, I was happy sometimes; no, I was, I was before you, before you showed up; and you were happy when you got here, and Livia was happy before she met me, and Anthony was happy; and then, what? Everything is fine and then something shows up and you can’t be happy after that; what is that?”

A brutal and gorgeous tale of manipulation, control, and desire.

Kirkus Reviews