Jamestown, Alaska — Frank Turner Hollon

Jamestown, Alaska is the story of Aaron Jennings, a bestselling novelist bored by his life of suburban monotony and increasingly disturbed by the stories of violence in his newspaper, who wakes one morning to find a small red book on his doorstep. There is no title, no author's name on the spine: just the words The Survival Manifesto inscribed on the first page, and an invocation to a chosen few to abandon the society of the incompetent, lazy, and immoral and build a new utopia in the wilds of Alaska. Jennings is invited to the commune to write, or rewrite, the history of the imminent worldwide revolution.

Skeptical but insatiably curious, Jennings sets out for Alaska in the company of the seven mysterious members of the Committee, pursued by a sinister figure (his next-door neighbor?) who seems to oppose the Committee's mission. But the human vices have reached Jamestown first, and the foundation of the commune is already faltering. As Jennings becomes entangled with the secrets of Jamestown, falling out of touch with his family and the life he left behind, he grows increasingly paranoid about what kind of game he's stumbled into, and whether anything in Jamestown is as it seems.

With spare prose and sharp insight into the fallacies of the human mind, Frank Turner Hollon's Jamestown walks the line between ludicrous and ominous in the style of Karen Russell, Jim Shepard, and Kurt Vonnegut.