PRETTY IS

This chilling debut novel is about their darkly formative summer under the watchful gaze of their kidnapper, and how their experience stains the days to come.

When Lois and Carly May are twelve years old, they’re abducted, driven across the country, and imprisoned in a hunting lodge for two months. Lois Lonsdale has just begun teaching at a small college when she is forced to contend with a disturbing and obsessive student whom she suspects—perhaps irrationally—of being the son of her kidnapper. The past looms even closer when she learns that the actress cast to star in the film adaptation of her pseudonymous thriller, Deep in the Woods, is Chloe Savage—formerly Carly May Smith, the girl with whom she spent that long-ago summer as the increasingly willing captive of a perversely appealing young man they knew only as Zed. Increasingly haunted by the unspeakable experience that has shaped their lives, the two women ultimately find themselves together again in the woods of British Columbia, where the film that both echoes and falsifies their beautiful, terrible story, is being shot. Tangled narratives and conflicting desires collide on the film set where their dark past has been faithfully reconstructed. Margaret Mitchell has published short fiction in a number of literary magazines. Her story “It Would Be Different If” is included in The Bedford Introduction to Literature. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia.