Bennett Madison

Bennett Madison threads fantasy through fiction in which identity remains productively unstable. September Girls, published by HarperTeen in 2013, sends seventeen-year-old Sam to the North Carolina Outer Banks after his mother leaves the family. There he encounters a community of mysterious blonde girls whose origins connect the contemporary beach setting to myth. The novel uses magical realism to explore manhood, adolescence, transformation, and girlhood from competing positions. It followed Madison’s Lulu Dark mysteries and The Blonde of the Joke, extending his writing for younger readers beyond detective plots into a stranger coastal mythology. September Girls alternates Sam’s first-person account with brief collective passages from the girls, giving different perspectives on the same summer. That structural choice captures Madison’s interest in how stories about attraction and belonging change according to who is allowed to speak, and in how myths alter when the people treated as mysterious figures interrupt the observer’s version of events.