The Disappointment is set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, and follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality that’s warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal, that threatens to unravel them

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, Jack, a former playwright mourning his failed career, catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbours, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage—to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humour, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed centre stage in one’s own life.

Available from Penguin Random House

Scott Broker  is a queer writer based in Los Angeles. A Lambda Literary Fellow and Tin House Scholar, he has been a finalist for the Iowa Review Prize in Fiction, the New England Review‘s Emerging Writer Award, and a nominee for three Pushcart Prizes.

His debut novel, The Disappointment, is out now from Catapult. Other writing has appeared in Ecotone, New England Review, Guernica, Fence, the Idaho Review, the Cincinnati Review, Joyland, and the Adroit Journal, among other publications.

He holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Seattle University and an MFA from Ohio State University, where he was awarded the Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award.

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist based in Toronto with a focus on tourism, lifestyle, entertainment and community issues. He has written several travel articles and has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He’s willing to take on any assignments of interest, attend parties with free booze, listen to rants, and travel the world in search of the great unknown. He’s eager to discover the new, remember the past, and look into the future.