YOU WILL KNOW ME – Megan Abbott

          Megan Abbott doesn’t know me, and probably never will. Still, she owes me six hours of restful sleep. They were strange dreams I had last night. Not my routine searching-for-a-place-to-pee or getting-lost-in-a-building or trying-to-impress-my-father frustration scenarios. I shake those off soon as I'm awake and on my way to the bathroom. Nosiree, ma'am. These things last night were unfamiliar, deeply discomfiting, clinging dream fragments. Semi-conscious glimpses of something vaguely menacing. I can't recall any particulars, but whenever I woke, or seemed to be waking, I felt a presence near me. Hovering close to my head. A cold, mocking presence. And I was alone. No one to call out to, like Drew Knox did when he had his ghastly nightmares in You Will Know Me.

   

       It was You Will Know Me, of course, disturbing my sleep. I'd stayed up late finishing it. Something I seldom do. Something I knew I shouldn't do with a Megan Abbott novel, but something I know I'll do again, and again, and again, regardless. Abbot casts a deliciously unsettling spell I am powerless to resist. It comes upon me incrementally, hints revealed in what seems a perfectly ordinary tableau. Faces I recognize and feel I know. Until I notice something different. An odd glint in the eyes, shadows that lie beyond my first impression. Words in an unexpected, inappropriate context.

   

       The effect is cumulative, edging into my comprehension like a storm front blotting a sunny horizon. In You Will Know Me, Abbott reveals the suspicious cloud bank's nose at the very beginning:

      The vinyl banners rippled from the air vent, the restaurant roiling with parents, the bobbing of gymnast heads, music gushing from the weighty speakers keeled on the window ledges.

      Slung around Devon’s neck were three medals, two silver and one gold, her first regional-champion title on the vault.

      “I’m so proud of you, sweetie,” Katie whispered in her daughter’s ear. “You can do anything.”

      Later, Katie would come to think of that night as the key to everything that came after, the secret code.

      But at the time, it was just another party, a celebration like dozens of others, all to honor their exceptional fifteen-year-old daughter.

           Trouble ahead. Fair warning. And Abbott does play fair, all the way. The clues she scattered so artfully along the narrative create a random texture that now and then gave me the sense I was a step or two ahead of the main characters. Yet collectively these nebulous erratic whiffs of danger never quite coalesced into certainty. One thing, though, was for sure: a relentless encroaching unease weighting the air.

Megan Abbott

 

           A large part of the fragility of my confidence in the appearance of things in You Will Know Me came from the woman whose viewpoint carries most of the story--Katie, mother of Devon, the teenage gymnast prodigy and focus of everyone's concern. I shared Katie's bias as a mom, which included misinterpreting or rationalizing initial signs that raised tiny questions about the way things seemed. I stayed with her as these signs mounted until I began to see, or think I saw, significance Katie was missing. Now it got tricky for me. I could see the true narrator--Abbott--was being sly, smooth as satin, playing with me as she led Katie, and then me, this way and that until I yielded to her mastery and simply hung on for the ride.

           It helped calm me recognizing a couple of Abbott's ploys. She foreshadows by ducking back to an earlier time. The beginning, for example, gave me Katie already knowing how it all comes out reflecting how it all started. This happened several times, the finding clarity from a step or so back. I suppose it can confuse readers accustomed to strictly sequential narrative, but for me it helped bring into focus Katie's own attempts to understand what was happening as it unfolded around her.

 

          While all eyes ostensibly were on Devon, a fascinating individual around whom the story centers with its theme of how far people will go, what they're willing to accept and to sacrifice in order to realize a dream, I found Devon's younger brother, Drew, the most interesting character. Both as a person and as the character that ties the story together. He's a brilliant, precocious little nerd. In some settings he'd be an obnoxious little nerd, and sometimes he was that here, too. But the obnoxiousness, I eventually learned, was in fact a gift. Drew is a little oracle. His nightmares had a prescience I found unnerving, especially as it eluded, even annoyed his family. At the same time I came to respect his outlook, his observance of detail, and his native savvy. I came to rely on the little guy more and more as niggling suspicions began to gather, merging, fusing eventually into a roar of revelation that assaulted my own ears.

          "I could hear thousands of eyes watching us," gold medal Olympian Nadia Comaneci says in her book Letters to a Young Gymnast, a book Megan Abbott quotes from variously in You Will Know Me. 

          I know I'll never get back those six hours of sleep Abbott took from me, and in truth their loss was a small price for the return. The vital human questions she raised in this all-too-human story continue echoing for me. I hope they always will.

SHOT IN DETROIT – Patricia Abbott

I rarely abandon a novel once I've started it. There have been some—Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow come to mind—I've needed several false starts before getting up enough traction or momentum to finally read to the end. Most recently I gave up on a debut novel by a brilliant writer I won't name whose narrator is a serial killer sexually aroused by his murders. Creeped me out, and I doubt I will ever come back to it. Squeamish, some might say, but I prefer “humanely sensitive.” I can't help identifying with compelling characters in novels, and there are some I just cannot abide.

Violet Hart, the narrator in Patricia Abbott's new novel, Shot in Detroit,

seemed at first to be one of these. Hart is an artist obsessed with taking photographs of dead young black men in their coffins. Knowing this I might never have started the book had the author been someone other than Abbott. Even then I hesitated a tad, even still savoring her debut novel, Concrete Angel, which has lit up the crime-fiction community to rave reviews and awards. I've lived long enough to have come to terms with death—of family and friends, natural and violent--and have reached an albeit edgy peace with the inevitability of my own demise, not unreasonably distant down that road we're told we all eventually must walk alone. At the same time morbidity continues to put me off. Grateful Dead to me is the name of a band. It might mean more to some, but not me--I hear the rippling intro to Truckin'. I feel obliged to focus my attention on the potential for growth the statistically brief time left to me has in store. Better busy being born than busy dying, as Bob Dylan sagely advised.

So wouldn't you know, several chapters in, Shot in Detroit started giving me the same creepy feeling I got from the other novel, the one with the sexual fetish serial killer narrator I abandoned. And I wasn't much liking Violet Hart, who seemed a calloused young woman who put her art above all else. She has a mirror on the ceiling above her bed for added dimension to her trysts, which to her seem to have little more significance than carnal quality. But more than not liking her, I wasn't liking what she was doing, taking photos of dead bodies in coffins. It didn't help that she was taking great pains, artistic pains, to preserve these young men in images that greatly interested the owner of a gallery who wanted to feature them in a showing. I found this disturbing, and so did Hart's boyfriend, the mortician who had unintentionally sparked her obsession and, although allowing her to shoot the photos at his funeral home, was growing uneasy about her project.

Patricia Abbott

Something kept me on track, though. Abbott's skill with characters, bringing them alive with yearnings and fears, weaknesses, and strengths, has a way of winning you over, infiltrating your defenses. You start feeling friendly, no matter what they're up to. You sort of want to have their back, help them when they're in a jam. It was Father's Day when I read Shot in Detroit. My own daughter is in Los Angeles, a struggling actress. I'm in Virginia. I worry about her out there. As I read Violet Hart's unsettling narrative I began to wonder why Sarah hadn't called me yet. My paternal instincts were kicking in. They bled unto the pages I was reading.

Soon I was Violet's dad. Her own father had abandoned the family shortly after she was born. Her story was drawing me in as his surrogate. “Stop with this thing about dead bodies,” I more than once almost hollered. “Keep your mouth shut,” I snapped silently while police detectives interrogated her as a suspect in the violent deaths of a couple of young men she knew. I offered unspoken sympathy and gentle advice during her interior monologues when she worried about her decisions and the course her life was taking. “No!!” I'm afraid I might have shouted out loud when it seemed the unthinkable had just happened.

So did I finish Shot in Detroit? Would I have written this review if I hadn't? (I don't review books I've abandoned, even to pan what I've read of them.) Did I like Shot in Detroit? Yes. Speak up, I can't hear you. YES, DAMMIT, I LOVED IT!! Thanks. Oh, did my daughter call? C'mon, you want me to spoil the ending?

Click on any of the links below to buy Shot in Detroit:

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Flannery Forgotten? (A Good Man is Hard to Find)

Imagining being forced at gunpoint to nominate someone for the title of Ultimate Forgotten Crime Writer, only one name comes to mind: Flannery O'Connor.

“You ignorant cretin,” the literary gunsel likely would snarl, waving his delicately engraved Mauser pocket pistol in my face as other literati circled around, agape. My attacker would add, voice rising to include the onlookers, “How did you get in here, anyway? Surely you weren't invited?”

“Yeah,” a voice would thunder from within the gathering herd, “Forgotten, hell! I'm focusing my seminar this term on her work.” A soprano shrills above the swelling rumble of crisply sophisticated mutterings: “Crime? How dare you disparage Miss O'Connor as a genre writer! Shame on you.” Another voice, a baritone: “Get the bricks! Let's stone this dumb bastard!”

Concrete Angel [book report]

I haven't read any other reviews of Patricia Abbott's fine debut noir novel, Concrete Angel, but I can't imagine any of them—up to and including the likes of Michiko Kakutani, the dragon queen of New York literary reviewers—starting out any other way than something like this: Concrete Angel begins with a bang, quite literally. Six of them in fact.

There. I didn't put it in quotes because for all I know I'm the first, and I intend to post this without checking for others.

So the chief villain in this story, a gorgeous, highly talented woman the narrator calls Mother, pumps six bullets into a soda-pop salesman in her apartment. She had picked him up at a shoe-repair shop only hours earlier and enjoyed a romp with him in her bed before dispatching him with a revolver. He'd caught her taking bills from his wallet and had grabbed the phone to call the police. “Mother” couldn't allow this, as she already had something of a record and had an aversion to jail. Thus, relying on the time-tested felon's credo that dead men tell no tales, she silenced him before he could make the call.

On second thought, it occurred to her the killing might cause her more trouble than the theft of a few dollars. She needed an alibi, a fall guy...something. Mother was not about to take the rap for murder. Maybe, just maybe, she could pin it on...why, this story's narrator, of course! Twelve-year-old Christine, her daughter, asleep in the next room.

Christine had slept through the murder, all six bangs of it. But her mother shook her awake and the two had a tearful chat. The girl was smart for her age but would do anything for her mother's approval. She went along with a concocted version of how the killing went down. She pled guilty to shooting the salesman after she saw him “trying to strangle” her mother. The court gave her probation and ordered counseling.

Concrete Angel is Christine's story, but she keeps the spotlight throughout on Mother, who comes across as a sort of amalgam of the Joan Crawford of Mommie Dearest and Mame of Auntie Mame. I should note I've read neither of the aforementioned accounts by relatives of the title characters. The stars in each are larger-than-life dominant women, and the sense I have of them from popular accounts seems to fit Mother quite well: a narcissistic, compulsively acquisitive sociopath brilliantly adept at manipulating others.

We follow Christine's incremental awakening to the reality of her mother and their relationship, which, while seeming at first to Christine an enviable mother-daughter intimacy gradually shows itself to be a dangerous illusion. Ultimately Christine has serious urges to kill her mother in order to rescue her much younger brother from falling into the same trap that threatened to smother her.

Christine's voice is chillingly authentic as she reveals to us her growing awareness of a nightmare from which escape begins to look impossible. The climax of Concrete Angel matches the stunning opening in gaping suspense.

While Concrete Angel is Patricia Abbott's first published novel, she's an award-winning crime fiction writer with more than 100 published stories including two ebooks: Monkey Justice and Home Invasion. Um, yeah, I guess you could say I'm a fan.