Home After Dark

Multi-award-winning writer/artist Small (Stitches) returns with an important novel about adolescence and the search for identity. In the mid-1950s, Russell Pruitt and his father, a Korean War veteran, flee Ohio and settle in the rural town of Marshfield, CA. His father takes a job teaching English to prisoners at San Quentin, and Russell spends his days exploring, eventually befriending a boy named Warren. After a sexual encounter with Warren leaves Russell shaken, he ends that friendship and takes up with some rough, smart-aleck neighborhood kids. Their days are filled with wandering, riding bikes, and fantasizing about their futures, and all is idyllic until one of Russell's new friends hatches a sinister scheme to ruin the reputation of poor, rejected Warren. Small is a masterful illustrator, with an incredible ability to establish his characters' inner lives through physical gestures or facial expressions, conveying a kaleidoscopic style of storytelling reminiscent of filmmaker Terrence Malick.