Mr. Splitfoot - by Samantha Hunt (Paperback)

About the Book

A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women--Ruth (a scam-artist foster kid), and, decades later, Cora (her pregnant niece)--as they march, each in her own time, toward a mysterious reckoning.

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Editors' Choice and Indie Next Pick. From the author of The Invention of Everything Else comes a contemporary gothic about Mr. Splitfoot, who tracks two women across multiple decades as they march, each in her own time, toward a mysterious reckoning.

Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who--or what--has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?

In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa.

Review Quotes

A New York Times Editors' Choice A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Featured on the New York Times Paperback Row Longlisted for the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize? January 2016 Indie Next Pick A Paris Review Staff Pick Named a Best Book of 2016 by MPR News One of TimeOut New York's "15 Best Books of 2016" One of Esquire's "The 25 Best Books of 2016 (So Far)" One of Refinery 29's "The Best Books Of 2016 So Far" One of Paste Magazine's "The 16 Best Fiction Books of 2016 (So Far)" One of BookRiot's "The Best Books Of 2016, So Far"? One of Huffington Post's "5 Hot Books" Featured on iBooks's "25 Best Books of January" One of Read It Forward's "Favorite Reads of January" A BookBrowse Editor's Choice "Samantha Hunt's third novel, MR. SPLITFOOT, will haunt me...I've dog-eared so many pages in honor of vivid prose that my advance reader's copy of MR. SPLITFOOT curls up with fattened corners...the novel moves not just in two time frames, told through two voices, a first-person narrator and a third-, but also...it moves in the fourth dimension, stamping itself upon the reading mind. Hypnotic and glowing, MR. SPLITFOOT insists on its own ghostly presence."--Gregory Maguire, New York Times Book Review "The historical and the fantastical entwine like snakes in Samantha Hunt's fiction...Turned around and around in these woods, you won't always know where you are, but there's a rare pleasure in this blend of romance and phantoms."--Washington Post "This gripping novel alternates between two story lines: in one, the budding con artists Nat and Ruth struggle to survive in an abusive Christian foster home; in the other, set some years in the future, Ruth, inexplicably rendered mute, leads her niece, Cora, on a journey across New York State on foot. The narratives, which twist together into a shocking dénouement, are marked by ghost stories, from Nat and Ruth's forays into the world of mediums and séances to Cora's struggle to piece together her aunt's past. 'History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other, ' one character tells Cora, and the novel's pleasures lie in the intersections between the two."--New Yorker "The ghosts of industrial America haunt the author's picaresque third novel alongside the maybe-supernatural kind. Deep in upstate New York, two orphaned teens break free of the shady Love of Christ! foster home and make a business of claiming to channel the dead; years later, one of them, Ruth, turns up mute and gaunt at the home of her pregnant niece and draws her into a mysterious march along the Erie Canal. The two narratives alternate suspensefully, building a world of hidden forces and untethered souls that feels like the dystopia we already live in."--Vulture, "7 Books You Need to Read This January" "Mr. Splitfoot [is] at once an intriguing mystery with clues, suspense, enigmas galore, and an exhilarating, witty, poignant paean to the unexplainable, the unsolvable, the irreducibly mysterious...[Hunt's] epistemological and ethical rigor are complemented by a lovely respect for what remains uncategorizable, unable to be mastered or explained away."--The Boston Globe "If you're looking for one of those books that's an escapist adventure, a gothic page-turner that is also so finely crafted that you'll feel enriched as well as transported for having read it, try Mr.Splitfoot. The novel features two intertwining storylines, beginning with the education of two orphans who learn to interact with the dead, and relocating decades later when one of those orphans comes to find her niece and bring her on a mysterious journey. Samantha Hunt's prose sparkles whether she's writing about the most mystical of moments deep in a seance, or the more mundane times when niece and aunt stay slog through upstate New York as they set out for who-knows-where. The way the narratives ultimately come together is unsettling yet satisfying that the novel practically begs to be called 'haunting.'"--Esquire, "The 25 Best Books of 2016 (So Far)" "Turn to any page of this one-of-a-kind Gothic fiction about motherhood and hauntings--literal and metaphorical--and you'll come upon moments of startling originality...Hunt is scary good."--O, The Oprah Magazine, "10 Favorite Books of 2016" "Zombies are out, ghosts are in. [Hunt] taps into the cultural zeitgeist with a new novel blurring the natural and supernatural."--Wall Street Journal, "Six Books to Curl Up With This Winter" "The way I feel about Samantha Hunt's Mr. Splitfoot is how one of its characters describes meeting his wife: 'We fell in love in a bloody way, thorns and hooks'...Ruth's and Cora's experiences of that landscape are like hallucinatory expeditions through a gothic wasteland. Somewhere along the way, Hunt conned me into believing that temporary possession by a hellish demon isn't, after all, so different from the crucible of motherhood."--The Paris Review, Staff Pick "I started the recent novel Mr. Splitfoot, by Samantha Hunt, and there I was. Lost. The 'real world' seemed only marginally more real than the scary religious cult in upstate New York, where the novel is partly set. Though it wasn't a pleasant place, I was thrilled to be somewhere I would never, in real life, want to be."--Francine Prose in the New York Times "Creepy, disquieting and unsettling, this book grabs the reader right away."--TimeOut New York, "15 Best Books of 2016" "Hunt mixes her gothic ingredients with great skill, and throws in some quirky contemporary twists for good measure...The result is a riveting, linguistically playful tale about demons (real or imagined), loss, magic and motherhood."--Financial Times "Hunt's back with a modern gothic starring a scam-artist orphan who claims to talk to the dead; his sister who ages into a strange, silent woman; and, later, her pregnant niece, who follows her aunt on a trek across New York without exactly knowing why. Also featured: meteorites, a runaway nun, a noseless man, and a healthy dash of humor. Although it's still too early to speculate on the prize-winning potential of Mr. Splitfoot, Hunt's fantastical writing is already drawing favorable comparisons to Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, and her elegantly structured novel promises to be the year's most unusual ghost story."--The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great 2016 Book Preview" "Mr. Splitfoot is going to be a wild ride. If you're all about magical realists like Kelly Link, this is one title you'll need to pick up, because Samantha Hunt's third nov

About the Author

SAMANTHA HUNT's The Invention of Everything Else was a finalist for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. After her first novel, The Seas, she was selected for the National Book Foundation's inaugural 5 Under 35 program. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker and McSweeney's.