Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Neo-pulp master’s novel provides creepy head trip
Chaon keeps readers guessing amid mystery’s haze of unreliable memories and hidden truth
“What do you call it when someone can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not real?” This question is posed in Dan Chaon’s offbeat, powerfully unsettling murder mystery “Ill Will” to Cleveland psychologist Dustin Tillman.
Dustin certainly has the schooling to come up with an answer. But as someone who is struggling to differentiate between the actual and the imagined himself, the truest response to the question may be “life.”
In 1983, when Dustin was 13, his parents and his aunt and uncle were shot to death in the latter’s farmhouse in Nebraska. His adopted older brother Rusty was convicted of the murders and sent away for life. But after serving 30 years, he is released based on DNA evidence. Dustin’s testimony was proved false. If Rusty — who abused Dustin sexually, killed baby rabbits with a brick and lost his previous foster family to a mysterious fire — wasn’t the killer, who was?
Dustin has become involved in another grisly murder investigation. A client of his, a Cleveland cop named Aqil Ozorowski, has a theory that drowning deaths of a number of Midwestern college boys were caused not by binge drinking, as authorities have it, but a serial killer — one who plays a wicked numbers game, keeping his victims in flotation tanks until a catchy date like 11/11/11 comes up and then depositing them in a river.
At first, Dustin thinks his client, who is on medical leave from the force, has “some kind of psychological difficulty,” maybe post-traumatic stress disorder. But as the psychologist’s personal life blows up around him — his wife has ovarian cancer and dies bitterly, one son is addicted to hard drugs, another son has vanished — he begins taking Aqil’s elaborately documented findings seriously. Increasingly, he relies on his patient for friendship and emotional support, another syndrome with an elusive name.
“You know what’s real,” Aqil assures Dustin, who decides to write a book about the killings of the college students.
The deeper you get into the free-streaming narratives of “Ill Will,” which moves back and forth in time, changing points of view, the hazier they become. Painting the past with what one character calls a “swimmy quality,” “Ill Will” undercuts the reliability and usefulness of memories. “We were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden,” says Dustin’s cousin Wave, who attempts to escape that past by living under an assumed name, far from her surviving family members.
But of course there is no escape, not for her and not for anyone, — not with the psychological time bombs planted in our consciousness. “We’re more attracted to our doom than we think we are,” muses Dustin.
A ranking master among neo-pulp stylists (his 2001 story collection, “Among the Missing,” was a finalist for the National Book Award), Chaon adds to the book’s disorienting effects by playing with the physical text. Some chapters take the form of parallel columns, two or three to a page. White spaces and uneven alignments push words, sentences — and thoughts — apart. Dustin’s utterances frequently are unpunctuated, true to his tendency to drift off before completing a thought.
While such touches underscore the author’s playful approach, the writerly stagecraft keeps the reader off guard and sometimes on edge, in a kind of altered cognitive state. There’s a lot going on under the surface — more than one reading will reveal. Going back and reading this oddly compelling book again will only provide more pleasure.