Little Neck

Author: Darcie Dennigan

Publisher: Fonograph Editions (2025)

Erotic and expressive, Little Neck is a novel of secrets. A child is abandoned in the cemetery of a small New England town. Her identity is something that most people in the town seem to know, but no one will speak of.  So she grows up in the care of the cemetery’s groundskeeper, until one night when he catches her exhuming a body. Sent away to live with the town’s tombstone carvers, a pair of embittered sisters, she begins to piece together scraps of the past—and her dark family history begins to possess her. Is it possible to avoid the mistakes of our parents—even if, especially if, we don’t know who they are? How indelible is the link to those we beget and those we bury, and to the rocks and flora and weather of the place we are born?

Dennigan has written a cinematic meditation on desire, grief, and inheritance; it is in the vein of short, inventive works by Agota Kristof, Marguerite Duras, and Marie Redonnet, and infused with her own distinctive dark humor and tragic sensibility.