Tourist Season
Tourist Season
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Brynne Weaver on Tourist Season
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A town, a mentor, and a disease she couldn’t leave behindThe Seasons of Carnage trilogy is set in Cape Carnage, a fictional small town on the east coast of Canada. Weaver grew up in places like it, and the specific texture of that world, the closed-loop social knowledge, the local histories outsiders never reach, pulled her toward fiction long before she had a plot.
These are the kinds of places where everyone knows everyone else, and they look out for each other. There are people with quirky personalities and there are strange little local histories that you only learn when you’re accepted in a place like that. I wanted to make Cape Carnage its own character, with depth and trauma and resilience all its own.
The emotional spine of the book is Arthur Lancaster, Harper’s aging mentor who is losing his memory to Alzheimer’s disease. Writing him cost Weaver something real: both her maternal grandparents developed dementia, she later spent years in neuroscience clinical research specializing in AD, and her stepfather was in the early stages of the disease when she was writing the book.
Both my maternal grandparents developed dementia, and I was very close to them, so I had a lot of personal experience with the loss of personhood that comes with AD. I later went on to work in neuroscience clinical R&D, specializing primarily in AD. And now, my stepfather has early AD, so it continues to be part of my life. I really felt ready to tackle the topic in a book.
The decision to make Arthur fully realized rather than a figure of pathos was its own argument. Weaver had watched how her culture tends to handle old age in fiction and elsewhere, and Arthur was her answer to that pattern.
I feel that modern Western society is often quick to infantilize the elderly, and having been raised with my grandparents, I’ve always felt that was morally wrong. Arthur is fierce, brilliant, funny, grumpy, loving, and most importantly, deeply human.
How she wrote it
Puzzles, stored brain matter, and cinematic visionBefore Tourist Season was announced publicly, Weaver was already describing the project to Ingram Content in the specific terms that would define it: a small town that generates its own story logic, a world the author discovers as she writes rather than maps in advance.
I’m working on a small town dark romcom series! I can’t share many details yet, but I’m so excited about it. The town itself is just as much fun as the inhabitants, and I’m having a blast learning about this world as it comes to life around them.
That instinct to follow the world rather than plan it is consistent with how she described her actual drafting process at a live event on the Scythe & Sparrow tour in Belfast, Maine: she writes in disconnected pieces and assembles them afterward, like a puzzle, and said she had only ever met one other writer who works the same way.
Her master’s degree in forensic archaeology covers some of the research a serial-killer dark romance demands, but only some. The rest requires search queries that are harder to explain.
I have a master’s degree in forensic archaeology, so I do have some stuff, kind of like, stored away in my brain. But there are, nonetheless, times that you have to look up stuff about disposing of bodies. I have Googled so much crazy shit, I’m sure I’m on many lists.
Weaver uses the word ‘cinematic’ to describe something technical about how she composes scenes, not a metaphor for scale or ambition. The quality is deliberate enough that she credited it when explaining why the Butcher & Blackbird film adaptation, on which she is serving as executive producer, didn’t require her to rethink her prose style.
I have a kind of hyper-visualization of scenes, and I try to put them down onto the page with the hope that readers will be able to see what I see.
The characters in Weaver’s books are not instruments of plot. They exist prior to the story, and the story is what she overhears when she follows them.
The rest is, to me, the magic that comes as you get to listen in on the lives and conversations of your characters, and the story unfolds around them.
The personal thread
Characters almost alive, written from the inside outWeaver’s description of her characters as autonomous presences, not constructs, is consistent across interviews and applies as directly to Arthur Lancaster as to any of her leads. Arthur’s full personhood on the page, his grumpiness, his humor, his grief, reflects a relationship between author and character that Weaver has described in terms that go beyond craft technique.
I really see the characters that I write as distinct people who are almost alive in my head.
The Alzheimer’s thread in Tourist Season runs from Weaver’s professional life in neuroscience clinical research back through two grandparents and forward into her stepfather’s early diagnosis. That accumulation is what she pointed to when explaining why this book, and this character, arrived when they did. The synthesis of lived loss and clinical knowledge created a readiness that the earlier books in her catalog didn’t have.
Both my maternal grandparents developed dementia, and I was very close to them, so I had a lot of personal experience with the loss of personhood that comes with AD. I later went on to work in neuroscience clinical R&D, specializing primarily in AD. And now, my stepfather has early AD, so it continues to be part of my life. I really felt ready to tackle the topic in a book.
What she wants us to sit with
Fear, healing, and the happy ending that earns its placeWeaver has a working theory for why dark romance, as a genre, keeps finding new readers. She gave Rolling Stone the clearest version of it in early 2025, framing the genre’s appeal not as escapism from darkness but as a structured way to pass through it.
Dark romance is an exploration of trauma, darker themes, adult content, morally gray behaviors. Those kinds of darker elements to life, but with the romantic setting, so there’s always a happy ending at the end. It’s dealing in those darker concepts of past trauma, the concerns about feeling like you’re unlovable or alone in the world. And I think that’s why it’s becoming more popular. It’s almost like therapy.
The same interview produced a sharper formulation of why readers pursue dark material at all, one that sits beneath the genre argument and touches something older about narrative itself.
Culturally, we’re attracted to things like true crime or thrillers or horror for a reason, because we still want to experience the sort of dark excitement of it, but not have to live it.
When Weaver described what readers find in her protagonists, she was talking about the Ruinous Love trilogy, but the logic extends to Harper and Nolan in Tourist Season: characters whose fear of being undeserving of love is the actual stakes, with the thriller scaffolding built around that central wound.
They see their own vulnerabilities and insecurities. They see their own worries about whether or not they deserve love and happiness. For some readers, they’re able to experience fear and trauma through their eyes, and they can find some healing in experiencing those emotions in a safe environment.
Arthur Lancaster, the character she built from two decades of personal and professional proximity to Alzheimer’s disease, is where Tourist Season asks readers to sit longest. The book’s insistence that he remain fully human, not a symbol of decline, is the correction Weaver has been working toward since her grandparents’ diagnoses. The happy ending she delivers is earned precisely because it doesn’t look away from what is being lost.