String Follow
By Simon Jacobs
MCD x FSG Originals, February 1, 2022
Something strange is happening to the teens in Adena, Ohio.
A mysterious force is seeking inroads: vulnerabilities to exploit, friendships to hijack, untapped rage to harness toward its own ends. Who will serve it best? Claire is abrasive and aimless, embarrassed by her privileged upbringing. Weak-willed David is consumed by a recent breakup and harbors fantasies of violent, cultish orgies. Greg silently wages war against the voices in his head, while his sister Beth goes quietly mad, surrounded by lights. And at the center is the empathetic, naïve, sensitive Sarah. The force wants her most of all. The question is whether she will be the key to its success or to its destruction.
Eerie, hypnotic, and shot through with dark comedy, String Follow is a razor-sharp suburban Gothic that cuts deep, exposing the sweating, bleeding truth of how kids become adults in twenty-first-century America. In spellbinding, incisive prose, Simon Jacobs blends the startlingly original and the uncannily familiar, revealing the dark chaos that lurks under the surface of Midwestern suburbia.
Selected Praise
"A work of evil genius that put me in a literal trance and didn't relinquish me until the final page. I loved every insidious second.” ―Mona Awad, author of Bunny
About the Author
Simon Jacobs is the author of the novel Palaces, and the short fiction collections Masterworks and Saturn, a collection of David Bowie stories. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, and Joyland. He’s from Dayton, Ohio.