Failed love and a brutal assault in his wake, nineteen-year-old Micah Chambers flees his hometown of Carthage, Ohio for Midnight City, Florida, a down-market beach resort he associates with his long-dead mother, a place “Where the Night is Always Young.” There, Micah tries to lose himself in the island’s culture of drug money, romantic hope and easy violence, only to find the past is a living thing, and inescapable.

In the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Mary Gaitskill, Hugh Sheehy’s debut novel, Night People, is a modern morality tale that traces the consequences of chasing what used to be called the American Dream. There are no easy answers to be found in Night People, save perhaps that Sheehy is destined to become one of our finest novelists.