CARA HOFFMAN, like Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, writes skillfully and hauntingly about women’s lives, about crime and family and Gothic, rural America. Like Dan Chaon and Alexander Chee, Hoffman distills the essence of family into something darkly beautiful and worthy of intimate attention. She has won a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for her work on violence and adolescents and has worked as an investigative reporter covering New York State’s rural and Rust belt communities, where she wrote about environmental politics and crime.