Halloween weekend, 1997.
Mother-son con artists. A Star Wars casting grift. A haunted house, filled with terrors real and imagined.
It's been a year since Bridget and her teenage son have been home. Living in motel rooms, they now drive from shopping mall to shopping mall, posing as casting directors on the lookout for kids with star potential--that is, kids with parents too eager for fame to notice they're being conned. But on Halloween weekend, Bridget's pursuit of a mark leads them to a haunted house deep in a gated community, where her lies will endanger them both and threaten to extinguish any hope of returning home.
Weft unravels Bridget's twisting, furtive life with precision and dynamism. Kevin Allardice's prose is sensorial: It's vivid enough to touch and astonishing enough to quicken your pulse. Allardice has delivered a novel that will leave its crescent nail marks on us long after we've boxed up and returned our skeletons to the closet.
“With him, she was a parent; without him, she was just a crook.”
"Kevin Allardice's suspenseful, darkly comic tale of mother and son con artists leads its characters down an increasingly hair-raising path. Weft is wonderfully unsettling and unpredictable."
—Dan Chaon
author of Sleepwalk
"Weft is a spellbinding achievement. Kevin Allardice has woven a gripping exploration of family bonds and identity within a witty critique of American culture. It's hilarious, wise, and elegant—deeply emotionally resonant and rippling with creative risk. Weft puts Madrona Books on the radar as a daring new publisher to watch."
—Margot Douaihy
Scorched Grace
"Weft will make your heart race and break it all at once. This may be a story about the artifice of scams, suburbs, and shopping malls, but Kevin Allardice is the genuine article, a rare author who makes blending terror with feeling look easy."
—Samantha Leigh Allen, author of Patricia Wants to Cuddle
About the author: Kevin Allardice
Kevin Allardice is the author of four novels, including Any Resemblance to Actual Persons, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His most recent book is The Ghosts of Bohemian Grove. In 2022, Allardice was a Jack Hazard Fellow with the New Literary Project.