Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of a Hermit ( ECCO 2026) comes with some pretty hefty blurbs – Bryan Washington, Katie Kitamura and Rita Bullwinkle to hit the Booker and NBA names – and I can see why; the novel has that “je ne sais quoi” that makes it smell “Bookery.” It’s a noir detective novel, a study in grief, an existential dark comedy, a family saga, a comedy of manners, and it’s all wrapped up in the trappings of metafiction. Oh, and there’s an insanely unreliable first-person narrator in Dan Moran, and we know Booker loves that.
Dan is trans author. He is one of three adopted Koreans who are raised as siblings. The younger sibling, Kevin, died by suicide five years prior. Dan is returning home where most knew him pre-transition and refer to him by his dead name. The dead name appears in the novel simply as a blank.
The relationships between Dan and his parents and Dan and his surviving brother are interesting because we only see them from Dan’s POV – and that POV is not favorable. We know Dan wrote about his brother’s suicide and his family. We know he intentionally excluded his surviving brother from that narrative. We know no one in his family has read the novel. Through dialogue and context, we realize these memorial dinners have been happening with regularity. We also learn that Dan is not “no contact” but very close to it, especially with the surviving brother who certainly crossed lines and possibly committed crimes when Dan was female-presenting.
Dan has returned home after receiving an anon package that contained a picture of his brother. He’s decided to investigate his brother’s suicide for his upcoming novel, a psychological thriller. And he just drags us along, his madness and grief and self-importance roaring on each page.
The prose is lovely, but this one just didn’t work for me.
A Girl Named Tommi 