THE OUTER CAPE

Dacey reflects back at us who we've become, and shows us the devastating and powerful impact the past two decades have had on the American family.

THE OUTER CAPE is the story of a family, four people struggling with the ghost of infinite possibility that has haunted the American middle class for decades; a novel in a classic American tradition about the twisting ways in which the new generations atone for the sins of the old.

Irene and Robert are a golden couple of the late ‘70s – she an artist, he a businessman, each possessed by a dynamism that seems to promise them a place in a new and vibrant age. But as time goes by, Irene finds herself confined by the very things she'd dreamed of having, and her painting ambitions atrophy as she struggles to invest meaning into her role as wife and mother. Meanwhile, to give them the stability Irene demands, Robert reluctantly moves his young family back to the small town on the cape where he spent his own childhood and joins the family business. Robert may be a brilliant businessman, but he cannot shake a past full of risky investments and high-stakes gambles. As he begins an affair with a neighbor's wife, and a girl in the neighborhood goes missing, his trail of shady dealings begins to catch up to him.

Twenty years later, the two now-grown sons are combatting demons of their own as they return to the Cape of their childhood: Robert, their father, is recently out of jail for white-collar crimes, and their mother, Irene, has received a fateful diagnosis. Nathan, freshly back from the war in Iraq, and Andrew, reeling from the breakdown of his marriage, are unwillingly drawn back to the nest once more, where ghosts of the family's past must be finally laid to rest.

Patrick Dacey holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University and his stories have been featured in Zoetrope, All-Story, BOMB Magazine, Guernica, Salt Hill, The Kenyon Review and The Washington Square Review, among others.