The Hunt Club

It started with a body, the head of it pretty much gone, the hands skinned. We found it the Saturday after Thanksgiving, out to Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Uncle Leland owns the Hunt Club, which might make him sound important, or rich. But he's not.

Huger Dillard is no ordinary fifteen-year-old from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He may not have a father to help him grow up, but day-to-day guiding of his blind Uncle Leland--Unc, for short--and weekends spent at the Hunt Club have made him an expert on the habits of deer, the pompous attorneys and doctors of nearby Charleston, and the ways of the world. But with Unc's discovery of a mutilated body, Huger suddenly learns that he is expert at nothing--least of all his own life. Everything he knows and everyone he loves--Unc, his mother, his foundering teenage romance--is at risk, and Huger must use every ounce of resourcefulness and bravery to stay alive and protect what he believes in. Yet, when he finally discovers precisely what happened that Saturday morning, there is still one more secret to uncover, this one too dark, too deep, for him to even imagine.

From Bret Lott, the critically acclaimed author the Los Angeles Times called "one of the most im-portant and imaginative writers in America today," The Hunt Club is a novel of deft pacing and remark-able detail, and a sultry evocation of a land and culture that has existed for generations but soon may be lost forever.

Bret Lott is the author of the novels Jewel, Reed's Beach, A Stranger's House, and The Man Who Owned Vermont; the story collections How to Get Home and A Dream of Old Leaves; and the memoir Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, among them The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, and Story, and have been widely anthologized. He lives with his wife, Melanie, and their two sons, Zebulun and Jacob, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and teaches at the College of Charleston and Vermont College.