THE INVADERS

Twisted, depressed characters are up to no good in a tony East Coast beach town.

"Each time they put up big white signs welcoming people to LITTLE NECK COVE, A CONNECTICUT BEACH ENCLAVE, they were set on fire or spray-painted. The new homes that were being built on Spruce were vandalized. Everyone thought it was townies....But it wasn't them. It was us: me, Joe, Steven, Chucky, and Rob. That's what was so funny. It was us all along—their own children doing it to them." This is Teddy speaking, one of two unlikable narrators of this creepy story of suburban dysfunction and violence. Just kicked out of Dartmouth, Teddy has rolled home to live with his father, Jeffrey, and stepmother, Cheryl, a much younger retail clerk Jeffrey married after ditching Teddy's mother—who fell drunkenly to her death off a pier a few months later. In any case, folks are not welcoming anyone to Little Neck Cove anymore. As the story opens, the two-dimensional country-club ladies who populate the "enclave" are throwing fits about the local men who come to fish from the rocks each morning. Once aggressive measures are taken to keep out these potential intruders, who are in fact totally harmless, Little Neck's denizens are hemmed in by a massive, gleaming white fence. Behind it, things go south as the bored, drunk, pill-popping head cases of the community torment, maim, and sexually harass each other. Subtly edged out and ostracized by the other women, abandoned by her husband, haunted by her past, Cheryl becomes increasingly alienated and unmoored and rushes, in her muffled and deadpan way, toward the story's apocalyptic denouement.

This would-be dark comedy of manners will be too dark for some.