Ill will

I just finished this yesterday and have some thoughts!
I can see how this is described as a thriller/crime but I feel like it very easily dips into horror just in how it makes you feel. Throughout this book I could just feel this pit in my stomach grow as I knew things just weren't going to change for any of our characters.

~spoilery things below because I just want to talk about this book while it takes over my brain~
It was a ride to go from trusting Dustin as our thought to be reliable narrator to introducing other perspectives. It was so just well executed with the unravelling of his memories. I thought at one point Kate had planted even more ideas about what Rusty had done - but nope - it was real.Jill momentarily held him together but in a lot of ways Dustin was destined for coming undone. Jill also didn't ask him to confront and work through his experiences. So in turn the life that they were living was so delicately held together.

The longer I sit on it the more I lean towards giving it 5 stars — my only problem with this book, which I found to be engagingly written, structurally interesting in an unaffected, cinematic way, and complex in its treatment of the genre, was the extent of Dustin's delusion which would at times really beggar belief. Then again, I know so many people who are just as easily fooled by ostensible lack of randomness. Psychologists should know better though, right?

Also, the amount of creepy in this book is... wow. The author's been generous with it (saltbae.gif). I wouldn't quite call the book scary, but its horrors are all too relatable. The characters could've been saved from so much trouble if they only talked to each other! But they're human so they can't!! Because communicating is fucking hard. And Chaon is really good at writing familial dysfunction of the common sort, just as good as he is at making you feel the choke of the character who is trying and failing to form a response in a situation where a thoughtful response could immediately turn that character around on his path towards BAD SHIT.

Actually I'm taking a star off because I really wanted to read Jill's therapist's letter in full, I mean COME ON CHAON, YOU CAN'T TEASE US LIKE THAT).

In Ill Will, four members of a family are murdered one night in 1983 while their children sleep outside in a camper. An adopted child of the family is convicted of the murder and sent to prison and the other children grow up either coming to grips with the horrific event...or not.

Ill Will focuses on Dustin, the youngest of the group of children, cousins, who are left behind. He has grown up to become a psychotherapist who wrote a doctoral dissertation on recovered memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse. He has married a high powered lawyer named Jill and they have two sons. You quickly realize that Dustin is a bad therapist for many reasons. He allows his patients to cross professional boundaries, he accepts questionable stories without much resistance, and he deceives himself that he is in control of the situations he finds himself in.

When the story begins, Dustin finds out that Rusty, his adopted older brother, who had been sent to prison for the murder of their father and mother, aunt and uncle, has just been released after being exonerated of the crime by DNA testing. He also finds out that Jill, his wife, has cancer. Dustin's life descends into a kind of chaos that you feel he'd have the power to calm if he would wake up and stop lying to himself, or tell someone else the whole truth about.

This book is highly readable. It is psychologically creepy. Also, like certain horror movies, it has characters who don't listen as you tell them not to go to that abandoned former funeral home in the middle of the night, with similar results. It has some stylistic quirks. One quirk, leaving blank spaces in a line of text to indicate gaps in Dustin's thought, is pretty effective. Another quirk, where several narratives are printed in columns on the same page, is less so. I thought the ending was satisfying in that it solved the main original questions, but also left quite a bit open to speculation.