The Quarry and The Lot

Joseph Klein was a brilliant boy, talented—and dangerous. When he dies, at age 32, under uncertain circumstances, a group of his former friends gather for his funeral and see each other for the first time in some years. How did Joseph change them and what does he mean to them? What do they mean to each other, and why have their lives come to be what they are? The Quarry And The Lot is a novel about love and its limits, memory and history. It explores whether any truth can be stable when what’s happening is changed by what people understand and where what passes for normal is something far more frightening. Mark Wallace's The Quarry And The Lot is a big, complex, tender, angry, haunted charting of how each of us is many strangers, any past many pasts, our biographies always-already written by others. Ultimately, though, for me it's about that bland, dangerous medication called the American suburb--how, once you've had a taste of that stuff, it's almost impossible to kick, even as it turns you into a ghost, or a guerilla, or, sometimes, both at once. --Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets and Nietzsche's Kisses