Find You In The Dark

The first half of this novel moves slowly; as a reader, you're trying to figure out exactly how off the rails the protagonist's life is going to go, how sick he really is, and who he is really hurting. When the plot begins to pick up pace, you're (well, I am) tempted to stay up late or skim a few pages to figure out how it ends–who is going to get punished? who gets away with what? etc.

When my book club discussed this novel, we circled around the difficult territory of asking ourselves what parts of the novel are Ripley playing with the tropes of thriller fiction and which parts are perhaps him indulging (unconsciously) in the kinds of misogynist narratives that feed so much of this genre of fiction. Because the protagonist doesn't, himself, kill women, a reader may find him/herself tempted to see him as a better/healthier kind of psychopath (a la Dexter). But when you inspect the gender constructions of both the healthy-seeming and pathological relationships in the novel, you (ok–I mean me) find yourself wondering why did Ripley feel the need to go over the worn territory of “creepy dude stalks and kills vulnerable women” narrative in the first place.

I confess that #metoo and reading about Junot Diaz and other authors' sexual aggression toward women and the response that, if one looks closely at these authors' books, one can clearly see their attitudes about women, figured into my reading of this novel more than I thought it would. Where is the joy, the thrill, the excitement, of writing about the savage murders of so many women ? Is that not misogyny, full stop?