A bold, singular, and ingeniously crafted contemplation on young men whose lives have ended, but who still seek connection, understanding, and resolution from beyond their watery graves.

Caleb was driving home for Christmas. Steven was pounding beers at a local bar. Matthew was out looking for his ex-girlfriend. Leo was walking in the woods on a winter night. Then they disappeared.

Days, weeks, years later, their bodies turn up in icy rivers hundreds of miles apart. How did they get there? What, if anything, connects them? Some of their loved ones believe the official answers. Some are convinced the boys are victims of a shadowy network called the Smiley Face Killers. Some are trying to forget them altogether. As the living struggle for answers, Caleb, Leo, Matthew, and Steven find one another in the murky depths of the afterlife. Each reveals his own version of his life as they try to piece together how they died and what, if anything, their lives meant.

Every revelation draws the reader deeper into boys’ intertwined fates, taking you on a journey through the psyches and preoccupations of young men coming of age in twenty-first-century America. Beneath their humor, bravado, desires, and deceptions runs a current not only of grief but of a love they have just begun to fathom, a love that connects them in profound ways to those they left behind.

Christopher Castellani is the author of five previous books, most recently the novel Leading Men (Viking, 2019) for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Searchlight Pictures and Oscar-winning producer Peter Spears (Nomadland, Call Me By Your Name) are currently adapting Leading Men for film. The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story (Graywolf, 2016), Christopher’s book of essays on narration in fiction, is taught in many writing workshops. He is a longtime member of the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA program and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he is the current Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. For Last Seen, Christopher was awarded a 2024 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Boston and Provincetown, MA.