BOOK TIP

Day One

Abigail Dean

With the disconcerting reality that, in America, mass shootings are as rote as the lyrics to “Happy Birthday to You,” it’s understandable to ask why anyone would want to read about a made-up school shooting. But I suspect there’s a therapeutic aspect to the creativity involved in writing such a novel — and, in addition to that quality, a dark, horror film-style fascination for readers. In “Day One,” the terrific writer Abigail Dean throws a bit of a curve in that her school shooting takes place in an idyllic British village. One of the central characters is Marty, a troubled but accomplished and recently-graduated young woman whose mother, Eva, was the popular teacher killed in the shooting while protecting her students. The other main figure is Trent, a would-be journalist who falls under the darkly seductive powers of a popular radio/social media conspiracy theorist who insists the shootings never really happened. Told in alternating points of view, with a few timely perspectives from other principal characters, “Day One” is a deeply sad but beautifully written story where the secrets and backstory are revealed in gasp-inducing fashion without Dean ever resorting to cheap theatrics for the sake of it.

— Rick Koster

MOVIE TIP

The Instigators

Don’t sleep on this movie. “The Instigators” is a Boston-set heist flick that is a great, fast-moving ride. Casey Affleck, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Chuck MacLean, plays a bar owner who gets caught up in a scheme to steal the Boston mayor’s ill-gotten gains. He is the (since this is Affleck, slightly marble-mouthed) motor mouth to Matt Damon’s taciturn figure. Damon is trying to scare up just enough money to fix his fractured-family issues. Things, of course, go spectacularly wrong. The supporting cast is peppered with great character actors, including Hong Chau as Damon’s therapist (and then willing “hostage”) and Michael Stuhlbarg as the mastermind behind the caper. Another colorful character here: the city of Boston. Director Doug Liman captures the gritty underbelly of Beantown, and Affleck and Damon, who grew up there, bring authentic accents and auras to the proceedings. “The Instigators” is in theaters (where I saw it) and on Apple TV+.

– Kristina Dorsey

BOOK TIP

Burn

Peter Heller

The much-lauded Heller is renowned for his novels in which the immensity and beauty of nature play big roles — in a literal way as well as in a sort of pantheistic Big Picture context. In his harrowingly beautiful latest, “Burn,” two lifelong best friends, Jess and Storey, who take annual fishing/hunting trips together, emerge after several days in the wilderness of northern Maine to discover that some force is using a scorched earth approach to destroy towns, people, bridges and roads, and are also employing a communications blackout. As secessionists in Maine and across New England have recently grown more aggressive and organized, Jess and Storey begin to wonder if they’re become unwittingly trapped in a civil war. As they use all their field skills to try to find routes home — Storey to his family in Vermont and Jess to his lonely life in Colorado — fissures in the strength of their friendship and loyalty become tested by the stress of their situation. For more about Heller, who reads from “Burn” Monday in Westerly’s United Theatre, see a story in Saturday’s Daybreak section.

— Rick Koster