It happens in the second paragraph of the first chapter of his first book. Peter Geye's 2010 debut, Safe from the Sea, concerns a father and son, but it quickly establishes another character: Minnesota's North Shore, hanging over Lake Superior on its way to Canada.

The son, Noah, has just arrived in Duluth. Geye sets the scene: "Now he could see the lake, a dark and undulating line that rolled onto the shore. The concussions were met with a hiss as the water sieved back through the pebbled beach. The fog had a crystalline sharpness, and he could feel on his cheeks the drizzle carried by the wind. It all felt so familiar, and he thought, I resemble this place. And then, My father, he was inhabited by it."

Both of those italicized statements could apply to Geye, who will be reading from his work November 29 as part of the River Readings at Augustana series. In a phone interview last week, the Minneapolis-based author discussed the importance of the North Shore and the wilderness above it as a place (to him) and a setting (for his two published novels and the one currently in progress). He said either he or his editor came up with the term "Northern Gothic" to describe his books - a descendant of the Southern Gothic of such writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Cormac McCarthy.