Wolf at the Table

Set across six decades, the novel traces the Larkin family of Elmira, New York, from the early 1950s through 2010, following siblings whose lives are shadowed by violence, mental illness, and the revelation that one of them is a serial killer.

In August 1951, 13-year-old Myra Lee Larkin, the oldest of six children in a devout Catholic household, meets a charming older boy named Mickey at a local diner. He claims to play for the New York Yankees and gives her a ride home in a yellow Chevy Bel Air. That night, three members of a neighboring family are stabbed to death, and a witness's description of the killer matches Mickey. Myra does not come forward. Her 10-year-old brother, Alec, who saw her get out of the car, urges her to tell the police. His nose bleeds from both nostrils, a stress response that recurs at key moments throughout the novel.

The family is anchored by Ava, their towering mother, and Donald, a quiet World War II veteran. Their other children include redheaded Fiona; Joan, who has an intellectual disability; four-year-old Lexy; and infant Archie, who later dies of rheumatic fever.

By 1964, Alec drifts between jobs. Near Niagara Falls, he falls under the influence of Duke Foster, a charismatic drifter who recruits him for a robbery. At a variety store, Duke beats the elderly owner to death while Alec hesitates outside. Horrified, Alec boards a Greyhound heading west. At Christmas 1965, the siblings gather in Elmira. Fiona and Lexy erupt into an argument their mother silences. Alec does not appear but calls asking for money. Lexy discovers a package he mailed their mother: a container of feces with a postcard reading "Merry Christmas, Mother."

In the summer of 1966, Myra lives in Chicago with Fiona, who has arrived destitute and suicidal after failed theater work in New York. At a laundromat, a tall man with a BORN TO RAISE HELL tattoo harasses Myra. She begins a relationship with Denny Happ, a former West Point cadet in her building. The next morning, eight nursing students are found murdered in the townhouse where Myra used to live, including her friend Gloria Davy. The survivor's description of the killer matches the man from the laundromat. Again, Myra does not come forward.

By 1970, Fiona writes from a women's farming commune in Massachusetts, where she has fallen in love with a woman named Laine. She worries that Alec is "fading away" with each town he flees.

In January 1973, Alec arrives in Chicago fleeing a pregnant fiancée. He lets himself into Myra's apartment but panics at the sight of his nephew Ronan's toys and steals Myra's prized Mickey Mantle rookie card. A stranger named Jack drives him to a ranch house in Norwood and handcuffs him. Jack loops a garrote, a rope-and-dowel strangling device, around Alec's neck, calling it a "magic trick." When Jack learns Alec is over 30 rather than a teenager, he releases him. This stranger is John Wayne Gacy, years before his arrest. Alec escapes unknowingly, but Gacy's methods reappear in his own later crimes.

In 1981, Myra, now a nurse in Joliet, tracks Denny with help from Dale, her friend's husband and a private detective. Denny vanished six years earlier, leaving Myra and their young son Ronan without explanation. She finds him medicated and living with a former nurse in southern Illinois. He explains that a floodlight over their garage issued orders to kill Myra and Ronan with a hammer; he left because he did not want to hurt them.

Alec sinks deeper. By 1982, he lives on a houseboat in Paducah, Kentucky, befriending a 13-year-old boy and arranging secret meetings. In 1985, Ava, now widowed, confesses to a priest that she has been receiving postcards from Alec, each bearing a boy's name, an age, and the phrase SAYING HELLO AND GOODBYE. She contacts one boy's family and learns he has been missing for months. In Alec's childhood bedroom, she discovers a photograph of a naked priest, evidence of sexual abuse that may have shaped her son's path.

The narrative shifts to Ronan Happ, Myra and Denny's son. In 1991, the 22-year-old works at a publishing house in New York, writes plays, and begins a relationship with Henny Woods, a mixed-race playwright with a Yale master's degree in his playwriting group. In 1994, Myra administers the final physical to John Wayne Gacy at Stateville Correctional Center on the day of his execution. That night, her long-undiagnosed cancer causes a rupture and she collapses.

In 1995, Alec lures a 14-year-old boy to his house in Tunica, Mississippi. Bags of concrete and a garrote are already prepared. Two years later, Myra, weakened by chemotherapy, tracks Alec to Arkansas. When a young boy enters the café and leans against Alec, Myra lies to police to get the child arrested and away from him.

In 1998, Ronan experiences his first psychotic break in London, hallucinating a figure who instructs him to kill a woman with a knife. He returns to find a letter from Henny: She is pregnant.

In January 2001, Myra, 62 and in hospice, arranges her death with Ronan's help. She gives him letters for each family member and reveals that Denny is alive in a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital and that Ronan has inherited his schizophrenia. After swallowing three Darvocet pills, a prescription painkiller, she asks Ronan to read aloud from The Catcher in the Rye. Her consciousness dissolves into fragments of memory, then silence.

In 2002, Ronan delivers his mother's letters. At Alec's empty house in Tunica, he finds wet concrete and a child's Game Boy but does not open the door. At the VA hospital, he meets his father, who repeats the account of the garage light's orders and exits without looking back. In the parking lot, Ronan sees pulsing pink lightning no one else sees and performs breathing exercises until the sky clears.

In 2003, Alec returns to Elmira. He drops a pouch of his extracted teeth in the family mailbox, donates $14,825 to the church under a false name, and lures a college baseball player named Nash LaMore to a single-room-occupancy hotel room, offering the Mantle card in exchange for beating him to death. When Nash hesitates, Alec provokes him with threats about Nash's young sister. Nash strikes the heating pipe instead of Alec's skull, then screams for help. Alec's plan to die by another's hand fails.

In 2010, Ronan, a television writer in Los Angeles, watches his 11-year-old son Bruce freeze between bases during a Little League game, staring at clouds the boy says were "coagulating" into rabbits. Ronan recognizes the early signs of the condition he shares with his father. He reflects on Alec, now on Death Row at Parchman Farm, Mississippi's state penitentiary, convicted of three murders with DNA evidence linking him to 28 victims. He vows never to become a figment in his son's life.

The novel closes with Myra's letter to Alec, written before her death: "If you are hurting these boys you need to stop yourself." Alec carried this letter during his final trip to Elmira, circling six words and reinterpreting his sister's plea as a coded instruction for his own death rather than a call to end his killing.