**With the assurance and grace of her acclaimed novel The
Gloaming--which earned her comparisons to Patricia Highsmith--Melanie
Finn returns with a precisely layered and tense new literary thriller.
The Underneath follows Kay Ward, a former journalist struggling with
the constraints of motherhood. Along with her husband and two children,
she rents a quaint Vermont farmhouse for the summer. The idea is to
disconnect from their work-based lifestyle--that had her doggedly
pursuing a genocidal leader of child soldiers known as General
Christmas, even through Kay's pregnancy and the birth of their second
child--in an effort to repair their shaky marriage.
It isn't long before Kay's husband is called away and she discovers a
mysterious crawlspace in the rental with unsettling writing etched into
the wall. Alongside some of the house's other curiosities and local
sleuthing, Kay is led to believe that something terrible may have
happened to the home's owners.
Kay's investigation leads her to a local logger, Ben Comeau, a man beset
with his own complicated and violent past. A product of the foster
system and life-long resident of the Northeast Kingdom, Ben struggles to
overcome his situation, and to help an abused child whose addict mother
is too incapacitated to care about the boy's plight.
The Underneath is an intelligent and considerate exploration of
violence--both personal and social--and whether violence may ever be
justified.
The Adroit Journal: "How I Wrote The Underneath" (Oct. 29,
2018)
Read Melanie Finn's essay about how the novel The Underneath came to be
written.
