If all of Stewart O’Nan’s novels are marked by violence, they are above all haunted by the necessity to deal with it and to survive alongside it on a daily basis. In The Night Country, a true homage to the masters of the unreal, he combines the supernatural with pop culture, revealing the underside of the American way of life. On Halloween night, in a small town in Connecticut, five teenagers drive a car down dimlyreads roads, lose control of the vehicle and crash into a tree. Hell is not those of the dead but rather those of the survivors who are racked with guilt.