Widower sows grief into literary thriller
Before beginning Dan Chaon’s exceptionally unnerving new book, go ahead and lock the door, but it won’t help. You’ll still be stuck inside yourself, which for the Ohio author is the most precarious place to be.
“Ill Will” centers on Dustin Tillman, a 41-yearold psychologist who recently lost his wife to cancer. Her illness was a shock.
“His brain seemed murky with circling, unfocused dread,” Chaon writes, “and the world itself appeared somehow more unfriendly — emanating, he couldn’t help but think, a soft glow of ill will.”
But the fog of animosity is just starting to gather. His brother, Rusty, has been exonerated after almost 30 ■ years in prison. He’d been convicted of killing their parents, along with their aunt and uncle, in a trial that hinged on young Dustin’s sensational testimony of sexual abuse and occult rituals.
A fraternal reunion is the last thing Dustin wants — not only because he can’t shake the sense of Rusty’s malevolence but also because he can’t recall exactly what happened on the night of the murders. Thirty years later, devastated anew by his wife’s death, his memories feel even hazier but no less alarming.
The difficulty of separating fact from fantasy, and history from memory, pierces the heart of this novel.
Chaon, who lost his wife in 2008, captures the obscuring effects of grief with tenderness. But he sows that misery in a literary thriller that germinates more terror than sorrow. There’s something irresistibly creepy about this story that stems from the thrill of venturing into illicit places of the mind.
As Dustin tries to maintain his psychology practice, he’s increasingly concerned by what his just-released brother might do in return for those stolen decades. Perhaps it’s that alarm that makes him susceptible to a patient who wants him to help solve a series of drownings that police have written off as accidental.
Slowly at first, and then quickly, Dustin abandons his professional distance and throws himself into an investigation that relies on the same dubious psychological theory that convicted his brother.
“Ill Will” is told through a shifting series of narrators, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, but none of them has the full story of what happened or what is happening. In the novel’s most febrile moments, the pages break into three columns of text so that we experience these horrors from different but parallel perspectives.
It’s all part of Chaon’s ingenious design.