Daniel Mason’s 2024 novel, Country People, is a satirical work of literary fiction from the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020) and the best-selling North Woods (2023). The story follows the Krzelewski-Petrosian family, who move from California to rural Vermont for a year. While literature professor Kate thrives in her visiting position, her husband, Miles, a 14-year graduate student, finds his academic ambitions sidelined by the allure of their new home and its eccentric inhabitants. Through Miles’s journey, the novel explores themes of The Romanticization of Rural Life, Searching for Meaning in the Modern World, and Finding Purpose and Community Through Storytelling. The narrative applies a comedic lens to both the naive, literary fantasies of its urban transplant protagonists and the myth-obsessed culture of the locals they encounter.

Like Mason’s previous novel, the critically acclaimed North Woods, Country People is deeply rooted in a specific New England landscape, blending natural history, folklore, and humor. The novel’s structure incorporates metafictional elements, such as epigraphs from fictional texts and transcripts from a bizarre local radio show, to create a layered portrait of a community defined by the stories it tells itself. The novel continues Mason’s examination of how people construct meaning through narratives, whether in academic pursuits, local legends, or the search for a mythical world hidden beneath the surface of everyday life.

This guide refers to the 2024 Random House edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, animal death, graphic violence, mental illness, and substance use.

Plot Summary

The Krzelewski-Petrosian family is moving from California to a rural corner of Vermont for one year, prompted by a visiting professorship for the wife, Kate Petrosian, a successful English literature scholar. Her husband, Miles Krzelewski-Petrosian, a graduate student 14 years into his dissertation on Russian folktales, plans to finally finish his work but anticipates that he will be the primary caregiver for their two children, 12-year-old Wesley and nine-year-old Olive Krzelewski-Petrosian. They drive across the country with their truffle-hunting dog, Giuseppe, in a journey that replaces Miles’s meticulously planned scenic route with interstate highways and bizarre encounters, such as a stay at the eccentric Fort Inn. 

They arrive at the house of Professor Norbert Rumphius, an economist on sabbatical who has offered them the place for free. The house, situated on a large property, immediately captivates the family, and Giuseppe returns covered in dirt from digging somewhere. The children adjust to their new schools; Wesley finds friends through his complex world-building game, Cosmos, and Olive becomes enamored with her eccentric teacher, Miss Kayleigh Swan, who patrols the border of her property with camouflage and a crossbow. Meanwhile, Miles’s academic ambitions quickly stall, thwarted by the constant interruptions of country life and pet ownership.

Miles’s romantic notions of rural life are soon complicated, and he becomes distracted by media such as a local radio show called The Miscellaneous Minute. He’s entertained by its bizarre callers, including a woman named Bev who reports finding 10-inch green worms in her tomatoes. The family joins the Greensbury Land Conservancy for an “Autumn Ramble,” a hike guided by the boastful Hugh Lamoreaux, who regales them with stories of his celebrity clients like Beyoncé while promoting the fringe theory of a “hollow Earth,” based on the writings of a 19th-century local eccentric named Jeremiah Wylkes. Wylkes supposedly ventured beneath the Earth’s crust to find another thriving, subterranean civilization, which his followers now search for.

Miles also befriends Andrei Abramov, a former biochemist who abandoned academia to become an orchardist. Under Andrei’s tutelage, Miles learns to scythe, finding a deep sense of purpose in the physical labor that eclipses his stalled intellectual work. However, he learns from Kate that the orchard he operates only thrives because of his wife, who hired an arborist to spray pesticides while allowing him to believe his fruit is organic. 

The family increasingly bonds with locals and relies on their friend Miranda Kim to explain local lore and interpersonal conflicts, as she has performed extensive academic research on the town. When winter comes, Miles shifts to skiing with his daughter under the tutelage of a handsome former Olympian named Bjorn Nordqvist. His idyllic immersion in country life is shattered when he suffers a serious knee injury in a skiing accident. Confined to the house, uninspired about his dissertation, and increasingly isolated, Miles sinks into a depression, his days punctuated by the mysterious sounds of a rodent infestation along what an exterminator calls a “Super-Rat-Line” and the obsessive digging of Giuseppe (102), who begins to tear through the living-room carpet and floorboards.

Miles then receives an anonymous postcard inviting him to a meeting of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society. He lies to Kate, telling her that he’s attending a film screening at the college, and drives to a derelict seafood restaurant across the state line in Massachusetts. There, he discovers a secret gathering of people he has already met: Hugh, Andrei, the teacher Kayleigh, the land-trust director Serena Rubin, a popular social-media homesteader named Candace Flaherty, and a man named Reginald “Snowflake” Bentley, who’s compiling an “Encyclopedia of Foolish Errors” and claims to be possessed by a benign spirit (176). Miles learns that the group is dedicated to finding one of the seven portals to the “Inner World” described in Wylkes’s Colloquies. He becomes an enthusiastic member, keeping his involvement a secret from Kate. Meanwhile, Olive is beloved at school by Kayleigh but fights with friends over her belief in the bedtime stories that Miles tells her, and Wesley becomes invested in the school newspaper, choosing to investigate a suspicious company buying land in town.

Miles’s life grows more complicated when he volunteers for Olive’s school play, a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and develops a flirtatious relationship with its alluring young director, Nausicaä Torres-Lakeman. He considers telling Kate about her and the Society but hesitates. One morning, his own secrets are overshadowed when he discovers a late-night text on Kate’s phone from Bjorn asking to speak to her. Suspecting an affair, Miles flees home and dwells angrily on two occasions wherein he worried that she had cheated on him.

A massive snowstorm descends on Greensbury while Miles is out. He sees Nausicaä struggling with her groceries and considers having an affair as revenge against Kate. However, Olive, whom he left at home with Wesley and her friend Harper, gets into an argument with Harper about the reality of the Wylkesian caves. She runs off into the woods behind their house just as the storm intensifies. When Kate discovers that Olive is missing, a frantic search begins. Miles, realizing that the official Search and Rescue Squad will be too slow, uses a phone number that he finds on the tag of Wesley’s secondhand jacket to contact Hugh Lamoreaux. The Jeremiah Wylkes Society immediately mobilizes to help. 

As the storm rages, they comb the forest. The search culminates when Snowflake Bentley notices that Giuseppe is covered in a specific type of clay and encourages the others to follow the dog. Giuseppe leads them to the mouth of a cave, where they find Olive, who had slipped and lost her flashlight but is otherwise unharmed. The Wylkesians are ecstatic to discover that a narrow passage at the back of the cave appears to be the fabled portal. They follow the winding tunnel, only to realize that it leads them in a circle, emerging back at the main chamber where they started, their hopes of finding the Inner World dashed.

Afterward, Miles confesses his involvement with the Wylkes Society and his flirtation with Nausicaä. Kate, in turn, explains that Bjorn is simply going through a divorce and wanted a confidante; she denies any affair. The shared crisis and their mutual confessions mend their relationship. Miles finally admits that his dissertation is a lost cause and formally abandons it. Soon after, the local elementary-school principal, impressed by Miles’s volunteer work with the play, offers him a full-time position as a third-grade teacher. Simultaneously, Kate is offered an endowed chair in English at the college. Deciding to make Vermont their permanent home, they buy the Rumphius house.

The school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its absurdist changes to suit the large cast and Nausicaä’s creative vision, is a triumphant success. In the final moments of the novel, Giuseppe lies at home, sensing the approach of something extraordinary on the wind. A concluding radio transcript from The Miscellaneous Minute features a frantic call from a man named Todd, who claims to have discovered an entrance to the Inner World at the bottom of his empty swimming pool. He describes its wonders before the line cuts out.