Poor Deer

When an innocent game goes awry, one young girl is left dead and the other doomed to a fantastical haunting in the restrained and unsettling latest from Oshetsky (Chouette). The survivor, Margaret, now a teen, writes her confession several years later while holed up in a motel room near Niagara Falls. “I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical,” she writes, revealing that she accidentally locked her friend Agnes in a cooler in their Maine hometown. Ever since Agnes’s death, Margaret has been haunted by Poor Deer, a devilish figment of her imagination with “mossy yellow nubs” for teeth, who seems determined to remind her of her sins. In chapters alternating between Margaret’s confession and omniscient sketches of her past, what unfolds is a fascinating and often painful tale of a tortured childhood. A child whose strangeness can be taken as innocent or sinister, she is raised by her aunt and a mother resentful of her “little changeling” daughter. Her only friend is an old man in the woods who trains messenger pigeons, and she writes tales in a cypher intelligible only to herself. Oshetky handles Margaret’s monstrous manifestation with a delicate touch and infuses her daily life with a muted eerieness. Readers will be captivated by Margaret’s beautifully weird search for atonement. Agent: Alexa Stark, Writers House. (Jan.)