Lancaster Cooney creates an immediate intimacy between reader and character, masterfully luring in readers with the bait of characters as vividly incarnate as their own friends and family.
Jennifer Leeper, award-winning author of The Poison of War
Atrophied Mink is a dark, lyrical, and psychologically rich debut that merges small-town noir with a haunting coming-of-age tale. Told through vivid, poetic prose, the novella follows Jacobi Rusk, a girl orphaned by grief and raised in the shadows of trauma.
The small town of Lower Guild is not without its monsters. One, a high school phenom involved in an awful tragedy that destroys a family and the other a backwoods-recluse who has gotten off scot-free when a murder is deemed an accidental drowning. But fourteen-year-old Jacobi Rusk knows the truth. Sees the monsters for who they are and has a mind to make amends. She's been watching them for years. And the vengeance she has planned will be neither subtle, nor quick. When all is said and done, they will face a monster beyond imagination. One with tooth and claw and a storied history. One that promises only pain.
Through a cast of vividly broken characters Atrophied Mink maps the terrain of grief, adolescent rage, and slow-burning vengeance in a community unwilling to confront its darkness.
Lancaster Cooney's debut is as disturbing as it is beautiful-a raw, often unsettling novella that explores how loss reverberates through the bones of a town and into the hearts of its most vulnerable. With echoes of Winter's Bone and Let the Right One In, this is literary fiction sharpened to a violent edge, and it's impossible to look away.