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SATAN LAKE
by J & G Dryansky
McArthur & Co, April 2010
288 pages
$24.95 CAD
ISBN: 1552788415


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Angie is turning thirteen in the summer of 1984 and she has just been booted out of her father's loft in New York City and sent back to her mother in the small upstate town of Whitman, NY. The father is also anticipating a birthday - his 40th - and is attempting to deny the inevitable by sharing his loft with a girl only a few years older than his daughter. Meanwhile, Angie's mother is trying to treat her post-divorce blues by answering kinky sex ads in the local shopper.

Ross is also twelve and has family problems of his own. His mother is dying of an unspecified illness and has been an invalid for years; his father is Whitman's Chief of Police, a position that until recently had not required a great deal of his attention, the crime rate being what it was. But now, all of a sudden, a serial killer is loose, terrifying the townsfolk. Like a character in one of those urban myths, he peeps through windows or into cars, catching people engaging in enthusiastic, if not always conventional, sex. He then videotapes the action and kills one of the participants, leaving the tape behind. As a result, Ross's dad isn't home much.

SATAN LAKE is the product of a husband and wife, native New Yorkers, who, the book jacket tells us, work side by side in their Paris flat where they have lived for more than twenty years. A Foreword gives some hint to their collaborative style. One of them writes from the point of view of Angie, the other will be the omniscient narrator. Together, the accounts will produce something as close to what really happened as they can.

The result is rather less successful than it might be. The narrative skips back and forth through time for no especially good reason, while the shifts in point of view are similarly disruptive. Angie sounds like Holden Caulfield, if Salinger had written him thirty years later. The omniscient narrator sounds, well, omniscient.

The chippy style and time manipulations obscure the fact that the book doesn't seem to be about very much. We learn fairly early the identity of the killer; we do not, alas, really learn why he does what he does. We get some notion of injured innocence (cf. Salinger), but none of it really comes together. And the less said about the climax the better, though it does, in classic serial killer movie style, involve a pathetic fallacy of outrageous proportions. All in all, a curiosity rather than a compelling study in either evil or innocence.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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