David Fickett doesn’t look like a novelist. Whatever that means. He also doesn’t look like a Mainer. Whatever that means. When he bounds into the Ellsworth Public Library, Fickett looks more like a surfer with a compact build, sun-streaked hair and youthful bounce.

But don’t be fooled. Fickett, who lives in Winter Harbor, is a writer whose debut novel, “Nectar,” proves that looks can be deceptive. With a honey-toned book jacket and a recurring apiarian metaphor, “Nectar” could easily be mistaken for a sentimental story about the similarities between bee communities and human family life.

Instead, Fickett has created a elaborate cluster of complicated characters whose lives are revealed through a shifting narration and a streaming lyrical style. The Maine setting and knotty gene pool of the story are sure to earn Fickett comparisons to Carolyn Chute. That’s a superficial take on his work, however. Fickett is more in the tradition of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers – Southern writers who aren’t afraid to penetrate fearlessly into the deepest secrets of a town or family.

The queen bee of “Nectar” is Ginny Gilley, a second-generation beekeeper and fiercely entrepreneurial matriarch in a backwoods Maine town during the first part of the 20th century. Gilley is poor but ambitious and, despite the passel of randy and good-for-nothing men who crowd her world, she is a survivor – sometimes through cruelty, sometimes through compromising bargains. When Ginny’s lifelong love dies in the 1950s, her son Caleb comes home to help bury the man he thinks may be his father.

Ginny’s story is the emotional heart of the book, but it is Caleb’s quest for information that suspensefully forces out into the open the questionable family ties.

“David’s book is very Southern,” said Cynthia Thayer, a novelist and farmer in Gouldsboro. “He has the ability to get into the minds of country characters. He doesn’t have Faulkner’s long sentences and probably doesn’t have Welty’s very objective, simple language. But he’s poetic when he writes about the land and how people fit into it. Setting it in Maine – like setting it in Upper Canada or the South – adds the texture that’s important to any book.”

Thayer, who teaches creative writing in adult education classes, invited Fickett to join her Peninsula Writing Group eight years ago after she read a short story he wrote for her class. The group meets once a week for three hours at Thayer’s house. Its members are writers who have serious potential and a drive toward publishing.

While in the group, Fickett worked on several longer works of fiction. His first novel, “Mud Season,” about a philandering lobsterman who is surprised by true love, hasn’t yet found a publisher. But “Nectar,” which was originally called “Beekeepers” and is somewhat darker than the first book, was quickly picked up by Forge, a New York publishing house. It has already shown up on Book Sense 76, a reading list compiled by the American Booksellers Association and independent bookstores.

In the book’s acknowledgements and in conversation, Fickett credits Thayer with nurturing him along the path of writing.

“I wouldn’t have written this book without the writing group,” says Fickett, a designer at Downeast Graphics and Printing in Ellsworth. “I’ve always written but never took it seriously until Cindy Thayer took it seriously.”

Fickett grew up listening to the stories the women in his family told in Winter Harbor. The small-town politics and crosscurrents of family life he observed when he was growing up shaped “Nectar.” There was not any one story upon which Fickett based his book. Rather he allowed his imagination to wander back through shards of memory about his boyhood.

“It was more bits of stories, or references to so-and-so and their grandfather or mother. How someone still had the long nose of their grandfather or drinking habits of their mother or bad taste like their aunt, long dead, or how someone wears their hat over their ears, even in summer, because their great-grandmother always had earaches. The stories still circulate around throughout our family, and my hometown is small enough that if I mentioned any of them, they would know who I was talking about, or whose ancestors,” says Fickett.

On the day Fickett showed up in the library, he was interrupted by his 16-year-old daughter, Caroline, who met him there after school so the two could ride home to Winter Harbor together. She carried a book in her hand and spoke easily and smartly about other novels, including her father’s. She wasn’t disturbed by the themes of death, incest and small-town meanness in “Nectar.”

“Sometimes when I was reading it, I forgot my father wrote it,” says Caroline. “I love it.”

Caroline is one of three children – there is also Samuel, 12 and Israel, 9 – Fickett and his wife Elizabeth, a teacher, moved to Maine from the Boston area in the 1990s. As a boy, Fickett couldn’t wait to leave Maine. He had an early interested in art and didn’t fit into the sports culture at Sumner High School. After graduation, he left for The New England School of Art and Design in Boston, and began to make a life for himself away from the remoteness of his hometown.

Fickett was 21, had dropped out of school and was living in Boston when his father died unexpectedly. It was a turning point in his life.

“As a teen-ager, I brooded about common turmoils: loneliness, not fitting in, being loved but feeling unloved,” says Fickett, who is 43. “After my father died, the mourning was another excuse to brood. Like Caleb, I wanted to know: Am I wanted? Am I loved? What’s the point?”

Eventually, Fickett and his wife decided to move their children to his family homestead in Winter Harbor. Their middle child had been born with Down’s syndrome in Boston, and the outpouring of support from Maine inspired their decision to return to a place Fickett had once rejected. It was as much a longing for connection as it was to raise the children in a close-knit, safe community. Maine also offered a more serene setting for Fickett to pursue his writing.

That move and Fickett’s own journey toward manhood may hover in the background of “Nectar,” but the book never slips toward memoir or warm-fuzzy hugs for the hometown. Quite the contrary. “Nectar” is a work of stinging interiority and persistent imagination, both of which reflect Fickett’s interest in history and dedication to a structure as intricate as a hive.

“David is a real fiction guy,” said Thayer, who has published two novels. “I don’t think he needs to write his life to feel satisfied.”

Robert Taylor of Blue Hill is a former member of the Peninsula writing group and the author of two published books. He described Fickett’s work as original and marked by an intense and elegant simplicity.

“I very much admire his writing,” said Taylor, whose newest book “All We Have Is Now” was also published last month. “It is authentically his own. It’s hardscrabble and tough. He’s almost relentlessly honest and won’t turn away from ugliness. The complexity of the book is enormous and he dealt with it with such honesty that it’s believable.”

Fickett is now working on a third novel, about a man who takes care of his brain-damaged sister in the 1940s. When he was writing “Nectar,” Fickett relied on the characters and story to carry him toward a plot he couldn’t predict. The next book is dark, he says, “but I’ve always like gothic, something with mystery and suspense. And if I knew where I was going with the plot, I wouldn’t be interested.”

Readings and book signings by David Fickett will take place: 7 p.m. June 21 at Dorcas Library in Prospect Harbor; 1-3 p.m. June 22 at Borders Books and Music in Bangor; noon-1p.m. June 29 at Mister Paperback in Belfast; 11 a.m.-1 p.m. July 6 at Maine Coast Bookshop in Damariscotta; 7 p.m. July 25 at Blue Hills Books (with Richard Russo); 7 p.m. Aug. 1 at J.M Gerrish Books & Gifts in Winter Harbor.