Davin Malasarn was a boy when his aunt and father called a monk to the house on a night his mother was away. They suspected he was gay. What followed — a Buddhist exorcism — left marks that took decades to understand and a lifetime to write about.
That experience is now a novel. “The Outer Country,” Malasarn’s debut, was published Tuesday by One World, an imprint of Random House. The 304-page book follows a Thai immigrant family in Los Angeles whose secrets corrode from within. Malasarn, a Thai-American writer who works at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena as lead writer for presidential communications, will discuss and sign the book Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore.
In a personal essay published this week in Book Riot, Malasarn described returning to the experience that shaped the novel. He wrote that by the time he decided to address the exorcism in fiction, he had replayed the memory too many times. What drew him forward was not his own perspective but his aunt’s.
“I wanted to know why she was willing to take such drastic measures when she suspected I was gay,” Malasarn wrote in the essay, published May 5.
So he wrote the story from the aunt’s point of view first. Then from the mother’s. Then the boy’s, then the father’s. In a separate essay for Publishers Weekly in April, he wrote that asking four different family members about the same experience yields four different stories — a realization that became the novel’s architecture.
“The Outer Country” — the title refers to what the Thai characters call America — traces two sisters, Manda and Siripon, separated as teenagers when their parents in the province of Phet Buri chose to send only one daughter abroad. The decision sparked a rivalry that persists across continents and decades. When Manda arrives in Los Angeles to help raise Siripon’s son, Ben, she grows alarmed at his behavior and arranges, with his father, for a monk to perform a ritual. The ceremony sets off years of illness and secrecy. As Ben grows into a young gay man, he must confront the scars of a past he barely remembers — a journey that carries him from a stucco bungalow in Los Angeles to Stanford.
The path from laboratory bench to literary fiction was a long one for Malasarn. Born and raised in Southern California, he earned a PhD in biology from Caltech in 2007, studying bacterial arsenate respiration. While conducting postdoctoral research in Paris, according to his author biography, he decided to pursue writing more seriously. He left scientific research, went into university communications and returned to school, earning an MFA from Bennington College in 2020. He was a 2008 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and has published short fiction in the Los Angeles Review, Rosebud, Opium Magazine and SmokeLong Quarterly. He co-founded the Granum Foundation, a nonprofit that supports writers finishing major literary projects, and hosts the podcast “The Artist’s Statement.”
Reviewers have responded to the novel’s restraint. Kirkus Reviews called it a well-structured debut about a single moment’s lasting consequences, noting that Malasarn explores divergent cultural norms between Thailand and the United States. Publishers Weekly described it as an accomplished family drama. Booklist called it a stunning debut. Author Justin Torres, whose novel “Blackouts” won the 2023 National Book Award, described it in a jacket endorsement as an instant classic in the queer canon.
The event at Vroman’s, Southern California’s oldest independent bookstore, is free. The store, founded in 1894 and located at 695 E. Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena, hosts more than 400 free community events a year and encourages attendees to purchase the book, which retails for $28 in hardcover. For information, call 626-449-5320 or visit vromansbookstore.com.
Malasarn wrote in his Book Riot essay that telling a family story required stepping outside himself and inhabiting each character. The novel, he wrote, offers not one truth about what happened, but four possibilities.
