Summary

The Shore begins in 1995, inside a roadside convenience store where the 13-year-old narrator, Chloe, is buying chicken necks as crab bait. While at the store, she steals a box of cupcakes and hears of the murder of Cabel Bloxom, who was found “waist deep in the mud in Muttonhunk Creek…his face shot to pieces and all swole up with being in the water”—and with his penis chopped off" (19). It seems that the murderer could be anyone, since everyone in town owns shotguns, and the consensus is that the “[s]orry son of a bitch deserved it” for his sexually predatory ways; the cashier surmises that “someone’s daddy or husband decided that enough was enough” (20).

Chloe then bikes home past trailer parks, probable meth labs, and cornfields to her family’s dilapidated and junk-littered dwelling. There she meets her nine-year-old sister Renee...