Devyn Defoe, BURNSIDE

Devyn Defoe visits the store for her debut novel, Burnside, a Lynchian, absurdist novel about two disaffected young women and the local homeless man they become obsessed with.

“Burnside is the coolest weird fever dream you’ll ever have while awake. […] This incantatory tale of two young women caught up in an intrigue in a dusty CA town may well prove a signature chronicle of our American endtimes.” —Chang-rae Lee, author of The Surrendered and A Tender Age

The Bowl is a strange place: Surrounded by abandoned almond orchards filled with feral children and neighboring towns that keep burning down, the polluted, riverside city has a decades-old web of serial killers and missing people.

Our unnamed narrator, a bookseller at a used bookstore, and her roommate September, a waitress at a cowgirl-themed breasturant, spend their days avoiding their deadbeat boyfriends, commuting to class on the raccoon-infested ‘rat bus,’ and hanging out at wine bars with their friend Claudia Thursday. But after September has an encounter with a local homeless man named Burnside, she becomes terrified that he’s stalking her. Soon, the entire town has turned on Burnside, convinced that he is responsible for the violence, precarity, and wildfires that surround them.

Burnside builds a dreamlike yet utterly propulsive tapestry of brilliant, flawed, and dangerous characters. A commentary on victimhood and safety, both real and imagined, the cruelty of late-stage capitalism and climate disaster, the brutal contradictions of patriarchy and quotidian humiliations of girlhood, and a fiercely imagined portrait of a California seemingly right next to our own, Burnside is a singular, epic, and wonderfully strange debut.

Devyn Defoe is a writer and bookseller from Sacramento, CA. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her work has been published by Socrates on the Beach and The White Review. Burnside is her first novel.