Ill Will
A Novel
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this “haunting [and] strikingly original” (The New York Times Book Review) novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon.
“Ingenious . . . [Ill Will] walks along a garrote stretched taut between Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock.”—The Washington Post
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly
“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” This is one of the little mantras Dustin Tillman likes to share with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie?
A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning.
Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients has been plying him with stories of the drowning deaths of a string of drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses the talk of a serial killer as paranoid thinking, but as the two embark on an amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way.
Includes an exclusive conversation between Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For this exceptional and emotionally wrenching novel, Chaon (Await Your Reply) plants the seeds of new manias into the hard, unforgiving ground that will be familiar to his readers. In 1983, when psychologist Dustin Tillman was 13, his mother, father, aunt, and uncle were murdered. Dustin accused his adopted older brother, Rusty, a sadistic kid attracted to Satanism, of the crime, and Rusty was incarcerated. The murders shaped Dustin's life as much as they did Rusty's; his Ph.D. dissertation was on Satanic ritual abuse, and he practices hypnotherapy despite its detractors. Now in his early 40s, he's an ineffectual father of two boys and an oblivious husband to a dying wife in suburban Ohio. Having convinced himself of his vision of the past and clinging only to "memories of happiness," he's unnerved to learn that Rusty has been exonerated and released. What he doesn't know is that Rusty has reached out to Dustin's youngest, Aaron, a teenage junky sliding into Cleveland's dangerous underground, urging the boy to talk to Wave, Dustin's estranged cousin, who may know the truth of the murders. The paths of several characters converge as one of Dustin's patients convinces him to investigate a spate of drownings and Aaron's best friend Rabbit is pulled from the river, dead. With impressive skill, across multiple narratives that twine, fracture, and reset, Chaon expertly realizes his singular vision of American dread.
