The Kind Worth Killing: Devious, Deceptive, Incredibly Entertaining

Peter Swanson's devious, deceptive, incredibly entertaining thriller The Kind Worth Killing is your next choice in the "If you liked Gone Girl, you'll like..." progression. This novel includes all the requirements: Dueling narratives, despicable characters (that at times you can't help but root for), several twists, and a fantastic ending.

It's the story of a man named Ted, who has made millions in technology, and who strikes up conversation randomly (or is it?) with a woman named Lily at a bar at London Heathrow airport. They talk the whole flight home to Boston, and Ted reveals he's recently caught his wife Miranda cheating on him with a contractor building their McMansion on the coast of Maine. Ted decides, after several drinks, the best solution is to kill her. She doesn't deserve to live for what she's done to him. She is, indeed, the kind worth killing — a sentiment his new friend Lily wholeheartedly endorses, and therefore decides to help him plot to murder her.

Intermingled with Ted's tale is Lily's story as a teenage girl living in rural Connecticut with her hard-partying artsy parents — her dad is actually a famous novelist. When a pervert visiting artist named Chet does something gross to teenage Lily, she decides to get her revenge.

From there, much like Gone Girl, the less you know going in, the more fun your reading experience will be. Needless to say, the plot to kill Ted's wife doesn't exactly go as planned, and things get pretty crazy from there.

Often, Swanson reveals a plot point or engineers a twist, sometimes out of the blue, and at the time, it seems a bit off, or unearned, or just too random. (Through the first 100 pages, I kept thinking, "Why would Lily, a stranger, be so willing to help Ted kill his wife?") But one of the strengths of the novel is that then Swanson fills in the back story, and it makes sense...and is usually ingenious. You have to trust the writer here, and he'll reveal the reasons eventually. That's not always the case in thrillers — where sometimes, stuff just happens, and there is no good reason why. Here, there's always a reason — and it's why this is such a tightly spun, well-built thriller.

Another strength is the character Lily — she is such a sweet sociopath. Unlike Amy from Gone Girl, who we soon learn is pure evil, Lily maintains a semblance of rationality throughout. And that's why you find yourself continuing to root for her, even as she does awful things.

As we know, The Girl On The Train has been anointed  the undisputed Next Gone Girl champion, and I liked that novel well enough. But I actually liked this one better. It's a helluva a ride, and highly recommended. 

God Help The Child: Morrison's Dark Fairy Tale About Child Abuse

I have to be honest, I'm not quite sure what to make of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's new novel, God Help the Child, which is out today. As has been her trend over her last several books, this one clocks in at just under 200 pages. And as with all her novels, she creates a work that feels whole in just a short number of pages. The departure for Morrison with this novel is that it takes place in present day — the first of her novels do so.

The novel is a dark modern-day fairy tale about child abuse. It's not a difficult novel style-wise — indeed, some reviewers have called this Morrison's most accessible novel — but it's a novel that is an uncomfortable reading experience for at least two reasons.

First, it includes some unflinching depictions of sexual abuse of children — our main narrator, a beautiful woman named Bride witnessed a sexual assault as a little girl, which has scarred her for life. Her boyfriend Booker's older brother was sexually abused and killed as a child, and Booker has never recovered. Both of these factors, we eventually learn, contribute to why Booker and Bride's relationship ends right at the beginning of the novel, but we don't quite understand why until we read a bit further. (The plot itself is very straightforward. Bride's mother Sweetness has never liked her. Bride and Booker break up. Bride attempts to help a jailed woman. Bride goes searching for Booker. Some weird stuff happens. That's the gist.)

And the second reason this is an uncomfortable read is that I don't know what it all means, and that's what's most unsettling about this story for me. Yes, child abuse is horrific. Yes, love can make us whole and be redemptive (or when withheld, devastate us). And maybe that's enough to understand — especially in such a relatively short book. But there are some fantastical, fairy tale-esque elements in this novel too — and likely, you'll have to expend some mental energy figuring out what it means, how it's all connected, and what you ultimately take away from this story. It'll likely be a different interpretation for each reader. And that's okay. Fiction doesn't always have to serve up all the answers easily and neatly.

But even if you don't fully understand the story, or even much like it, you read Morrison because she's Toni Morrison. There are passages of such profundity and beauty that you realize how lucky we are that, at age 84, she's still writing. Here's one example that I particularly liked:

The piece of sky she could glimpse was a dark carpet of gleaming knives pointed at her and aching to be released.

In the end, I'm glad I read this — it won't be my favorite Morrison novel ever. But what're you gonna do, not read the new Toni Morrison? No, you're not going to not read the new Toni Morrison.

Everything I Never Told You: Subtle Cruelty Is Still Cruel

From the first line of Celeste Ng's deftly crafted debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, we know something has gone horribly wrong for the Lee family. Lydia is dead, and we spend the next 300 pages finding out what led to this promising teenager's untimely and tragic demise. What we learn is just how subtle, even at times unintentional, cruelty can be and still be devastating.

The Lee family lives in a small college town in Ohio where father James is a college professor and mother Marilyn is a homemaker. Their three kids are all well-behaved and academically successful — indeed, oldest son James is about to head off to Harvard. Life should be good.

But appearances, in just about every sense of the word, can be deceiving. One of themes of the novel is how being viewed as different (and the subtle cruelty implicit in such narrow-mindedness) can have devastating consequences. For instance, James is the son of Chinese immigrants and Marilyn is white. From the moment of their marriage in the early 1960s, they've been an oddity to some — most notably Marilyn's mother. And what's more, Marilyn has harbored ambitions of being a doctor, something women rarely did in the 1960s — so she's dealt with the prejudices of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, and for being different in that she isn't satisfied with being a housewife or secretary. Part of the tension in the novel comes from the fact that neither James nor Marilyn ever seem to fully understand how each other feels about their "different-ness." And it creates a rift in their marriage and with their children.

Marilyn has determined that since she hasn't been able to follow through on her dream in the sciences, her daughter Lydia will in her stead. You've heard of crazy sports parents? Marilyn because a crazy science parent. And she pushes Lydia hard, probably way too hard. James also pushes his children — he wants them to be popular, to make friends, to have active social lives — something he never had growing up because he was considered "other." Again, this parental push isn't intended to be cruel, but it has that effect for their children, who feel pressured and uncomfortable in their own skins — and wind up being cruel to each other.

This novel is another great entry in the category of the dysfunctional family story, a "genre" for which I'm a total sucker. But the strength of this novel is that this family isn't dysfunctional on the level as, say, a Franzen family. The dysfunction here, like the cruelty, is much more subtle — and it slowly builds on itself until something has to break.

I loved this book — it's a novel that's as carefully constructed (in terms of structure, moving back and forth in time, and how secrets are revealed) as it is beautifully written. Very highly recommended.

Get In Trouble: Ghost Stories, Nudists, Superheroes

The blurb game on Kelly Link's new short story collection Get In Trouble is extraordinarily strong — breathless praise from Meg Wolitzer, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and others, as well as parallels to Raymond Carver in the NY Times, were more than enough motivation for me to give this collection a shot.

Man, I loved it. These are goofy, often darkly funny, but tremendously thought-provoking stories. At their root, however, they're also really fun to read. There are ghosts, runaway teenagers, nudists, sex tapes, hurricanes, burial pyramids, space ships, and superheroes. It's about as packed-with-inventiveness as any collection this side of Karen Russell or George Saunders.

My favorite story in the collection is titled "I Can See Right Through You" — it's about an aging actor who played a vampire in a hit movie in the early '90s (he's referred to as "the demon lover" throughout the story, which just slayed me, for some reason). Twenty-plus years later, he realizes he's still in love with his co-star from that movie (this is in the immediate aftermath of an unfortunate and very public sex tape incident with his current girlfriend), so he travels to Florida to find her. As it happens, she's filming a documentary about a nudist colony that mysteriously disappeared. And to get into the true spirit of the place, they've decided to film the documentary in the nude as well. But our aging actor is distraught to find that his love is unrequited — the actress/documentarian is dating a young stud named Ray. Ray reminds the demon love a lot of himself at that age — which will mean a lot more when you get to the end of the story. It's a fantastically fun read, and a really great conclusion.

Another great story is "Secret Identity" about a 15-year-old girl who meets a man online in a weird role playing video game, and travels to New York to meet him for what we assume is a sexy rendezvous. She arrives at the hotel at which she's supposed to meet him, which happens to be hosting a superhero convention, and waits for him in his room. When he doesn't arrive at the appointed time, she decides to get spectacularly drunk, and then later finds herself involved with a narcissistic, rich man-slut named Conrad Linthor who lives at the hotel. This story veers off into strange places that includes butter sculptures and superhero sidekicks. Again, it's just massively entertaining.

Many of the stories in the collection have real vs imagined, or perception vs reality themes — like the story "The New Boyfriend," in which a young girl finds herself falling in love with her rich friend's Boyfriend Ghost Doll. Imagine Lars and the Real Girl here. Another story is about a group astronauts hurdling through space, and they decide to tell ghost stories. And the first story "The Summer People" is about a mysterious family of perhaps somewhat supernatural beings who live in a huge house on a hill, and a teenage girl who has to take care of them.

There were only one or two of these nine stories that didn't totally click for me, so this is a highly recommended collection. I'd never read Kelly Link before, but as I learned from reading this, her loyal, outspoken fans are certainly justified.

Thriller Time! On Child 44 and The Fifth Gospel

Plane trips are great for reading thrillers — and I rolled through two great ones in the last few weeks.

Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith, is about a series of child murders in 1953 Soviet Union. Our protagonist is the conflicted Leo Demidov. At the start of the novel, Demidov is a lackey of the State — he tracks down denounced "criminals" and interrogates them. That is, until a particular case gives him an attack of conscience — and circumstances beyond his control (a lecherous doctor, an ambitious subordinate) combine to cause him and his wife to lose their positions of prominence. 

Demidov is shipped off to a small town in the middle of nowhere, where he soon discovers a pattern of killings that match a murder in Moscow right before he was shipped out (and which he denied was a murder, as he had to). In the Worker's Paradise, there can't be crime — or if there is, it's immediately swept under the rug. So Demidov and his wife join forces to try to solve the serial murders of more than 50 children — but must do so on the down-low because, again, the official State position is that any crime is committed by drunks or simpletons. There's simply no motivation to do crime when life is supposed to be so peachy.

But one of the strengths of this novel is showing just how non-peachy life is in Stalinist Soviet Union. It's cold and dreary and people are always hungry and oppressed and live in fear. It's a terrifying peak behind the Iron Curtain. And it's a riveting thriller (and thankfully, the first in a trilogy). Highly recommended!

A movie adaptation of Child 44, starring Tom Hardy (as Leo) and Gary Oldman is out in late April. The trailer makes it look just as gritty and tension-filled as the book. I'm excited!

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The Fifth Gospel, by Ian Caldwell, is a murder mystery, a course in Catholic history, and a treatise on biblical scholarship — the latter two of which, you'll have to trust me, are much more interesting than they might sound. The story is about two brothers — one, Alex, an Eastern Catholic priest (a small denomination of Catholicism that's sort of halfway between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic) and the other, Thomas, a Roman Catholic priest. Their father had been a scholar studying the Shroud of Turin — the supposed cloth that Jesus was buried in, but which scientists had determined was a forgery.

This had destroyed their father, and ruined his dream, and he died soon after. So the boys were raised by their powerful uncle Leo. But their father also shared a dream with Pope John Paul II (the novel takes place in 2004, near the end of John Paul's papacy) to reunify the two factions of the Catholic Church. So we get a fair amount of religious history, too — including the reasons for the schism in 1054.

But so the meat the story is centered around a researcher named Ugo who says he's discovered that the scientific testing on the Shroud of Turin was wrong — and the Shroud is authentic. And he can prove it with a book called the Diatessaron that he's found in the Vatican Archives, which is basically is unified Gospel; a combination of the sometimes disparate and/or contradictory stories told in the four main gospels. But the fellow is promptly murdered before he's able to put on his exhibit in a Vatican museum, threatening the possibility for reunification of the Churches. Pope John Paul II had planned to use the exhibit as an opportunity to return the Shroud to the Eastern Orthodox church as a sign of good faith.

So our two priests — the older brother, Father Thomas, is actually accused of Ugo's murder and held secretly somewhere in Vatican City, and our narrator is the younger brother, Father Alex — is trying to solve the crime, as well as determine what exactly Ugo was up to, who is trying stop him, and why.

If you've spent any time in Catholic school, or just have an interest in religious history, this is a novel for you. It reads like a Dan Brown book, only much better written, and not nearly as "thriller cliche" as Brown's books are.