Monster creeps into book’s pages
Thriller novelist Claire Kendal conjures repulsive, terrifying villain
The Second Sister Claire Kendal HarperCollins Canada
When Claire Kendal started LONDON work on her harrowing new thriller, The Second Sister, she didn’t expect a human monster to lurch into the narrative.
Yet here he was, a repulsive serial killer named Jason Thorne, insistently entering her pages and becoming a pivotal figure in this new novel about a young woman’s obsessive search for the truth concerning the mysterious disappearance of her sister.
This posed an unexpected challenge for an author determined to deliver a worthy followup to The Book of You, her 2015 bestseller about a vicious stalker. The success of that book, which had sparked an international bidding frenzy among publishers, left Kendal acutely conscious of the need to come through with a solid successor.
“There’s a kind of toxic thing about that difficult second novel,” she says. “The pressure does creep up on you … but you have to put that aside and just focus on the writing.”
But wild cards can still emerge. The grotesque Jason Thorne had somehow landed in her world — so what was she do about him? When it comes to psychopathic serial killers, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs notoriety has become a benchmark figure, his potent mythology reinforced by the charismatic work of Anthony Hopkins in the film adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel.
Kendal saw the peril of simply delivering another clone of Hannibal the Cannibal, a danger blithely ignored by some other writers in recent years. But she also accepted that her own nightmare killer, Jason Thorne, had nudged his way into her story and would not leave.
“I didn’t know that Jason Thorne would walk into this novel when I started it,” she says with a laugh. “He just turned up, so I had to deal with him.”
Thorne is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital after murdering several women — and the novel’s heroine, 30-year-old Ella Brooke, is haunted by the possibility he was also responsible for the disappearance of her sister, Miranda, 10 years previously. Ella’s search for the truth leads to encounters with Thorne, whose horrifying nature decisively shreds easy comparisons with Hannibal Lecter.
“I wanted Jason to be his own kind of creature,” Kendal says from her home in Bath. “Hannibal Lecter is kind of glamorous — charismatic and superhumanly accurate about everything. He has done these horrifying things but it’s quite easy to forget the horror of them.
“I didn’t want to glamorize Jason Thorne. I wanted him to be repulsive and terrifying. In no way did I want Ella to ever be romantically attracted to Jason Thorne.”
Yet The Silence of the Lambs — a book Kendal admires greatly — continued to cast a curious shadow over the writing of The Second Sister.
“There was this quiz going around where you were supposed to fill it in and it would tell you what literary character you most resembled,” Kendal says. On a whim, she did the test — “I really wanted to be a Jane Austen heroine or someone out of Charlotte Bronte.” Instead the test concluded the character Kendal most identified with was Clarice Starling, the troubled heroine of Silence of the Lambs, a young woman trapped in an eerie psychological tug of war with Lecter.
“That really shocked me,” Kendal says. “I kept saying no, no, no. And my husband was saying yes, yes, yes — it’s got you absolutely right.”
But Kendal is wise enough to heed her subconscious when it comes to her craft.
“I can’t claim the book isn’t indebted to Hannibal Lecter because it is absolutely indebted — yet oddly when I was writing it, I didn’t know I was doing it.”
To her, what’s important is that she managed to avoid a copycat version of contemporary fiction’s most infamous villain with her chilling portrait of the villain in her own novel. As to why he chose to enter her world — well, the creative process moves in mysterious ways.
How mysterious? Well, it’s time for a confession. “I’ll be perfectly honest. I didn’t have an ending.”
Some would say Kendal was breaking a cardinal rule here — but she took the plunge anyway.
“I’ve never told anyone this before, but it was quite a difficult novel to write. I wanted a family unit with this missing sister — a family still coping 10 years later with the scarring and the sense of not knowing.”
And because Ella’s quest for the elusive truth might lead to shocking revelations, Kendal also kept herself in the dark for chapter after chapter.
“Ella is extraordinary but also ordinary — she’s not a Scotland Yard detective or with MI5. I wanted her to go through this investigation process as a very ordinary person, so I wrote still not knowing myself what the final answer would be. I would come to this chasm and then like Ella wonder what to do.”
The new novel has an extremely violent climax, but Kendal argues it’s valid within the context of the story she was telling.
“My previous novel, The Book of You, was also very violent, and I had to make some difficult decisions how explicit this would be. At one point, I took the violent scenes out, but it didn’t work. I didn’t agonize as much over the violence in The Second Sister. I just knew that to not make it as gritty as I could would again have a kind of dishonesty to it.”
Although Kendal has been hailed for her skill with psychological thrillers, she says she doesn’t consciously set out to write novels of suspense.
“With The Book of You, I tried to write a realist novel about stalking. With The Second Sister, I wanted to write about the love between sisters and the challenges and conflicts within a family. I’m only just trying to tell a story — but I want to tell it the best way I can.”