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Synopsis
The body of Glenn Partridge’s 15-year-old son was discovered in a vacant lot nearly forty years ago. The police are still no closer to finding the murderer decades later.
Glenn refuses to let the memory of his son fade—or let anyone else within this small working-class community forget. His long-suffering wife signs him up for an amateur fiction-writing workshop at the local library, just to get him out of the house and out of his own head.
Rule number one: Write what you know—so Glenn decides to share his son’s story. The class offers him a chance to make sense of a senseless crime and find the fictional closure life never provided. But as Glenn’s story takes on a life of its own, someone from the past is compelled to come out of hiding before he reaches…
The End.
Review
The biggest thanks to Bad Hand Books for getting an eARC in my hands!
Clay McLeod Chapman is an author best known for his devastating, depraved ventures into uniquely emotional horrors. Ghost Eaters explores the dark complexities of grief and addiction, What Kind of Mother touches on the unending depths of loss related to parenthood, and Kill Your Darling reads as a unique combination of these two. A story told by a grieving, elderly man, Glenn recounts his relationship with his deceased son and the years spent wondering what really happened to Billy. While Glenn’s speculation has remained mostly to himself, his wife signs him up for a writing workshop that changes things drastically, the story of Billy twisting and turning into something else entirely.
Chapman secures his ranks among the greats of ambiguity such as Paul Tremblay and Catriona Ward with this impressive entry in his extensive catalog. Much of his writing feels as though it is ripped from his still-beating heart, a tone that lends itself heavily towards Glenn’s characterization. The grief he expresses is raw and unaffected by the passage of time, a darkly vibrant emotion looming above Glenn’s life. We see this through the “book” that Glenn creates to remember Billy and tie up the loose ends of his unsolved case. It sounds like he’s playing the part of an armchair detective, but there is a distinct, personal note of emotionality that keeps this story from feeling investigative. It’s a tightrope that Chapman walks expertly, shocking us with the depravity of Glenn’s imagination, the state of his sorrow, and his inability to move on.
But back to that ambiguity. As sampled in What Kind of Mother, Chapman returns to the notion of a parent’s idea of their child, who a father believes their son to be in their absence. The years of wonder, guilt, and fixation on Billy’s gruesome fate have created a child of their own, a Billy-shaped thing that lives in Glenn’s mind. It’s an entity that encapsulates the hopes, dreams, and projections of every parent, now an infinite question mark imprinted upon Glenn. When advised to write what you know from this workshop, it’s ironically the things that Glenn doesn’t know that fuel his writing, the need to find an answer to that lingering question.
Here’s where Chapman gets a little “Stephen King” through his writing about writing. We see the strife and struggle of putting something on a blank page for all the world to see, the thing we hold dearest proving that Glenn’s writing and Billy aren’t all that different in the end. Kill Your Darling demonstrates the profound link between vulnerability and creation concerning both parenthood and writing. It’s terrifying business, sharing these pieces and parts of yourself with the world where anything can happen. Chapman’s prose exudes tones of fear around these vulnerabilities as Billy’s fate is undoubtedly reflective of a worst-case scenario. It’s brilliant writing through and through, provoking the deepest thoughts regarding fears, rejections, and unsettling truths.
With a deft hand, Clay McLeod Chapman executes a masterful tale of introspection, susceptibility, and unfiltered anguish with Kill Your Darling. At novella length, Glenn’s story is hard to put down and propelled by the innate desire for closure. While functioning as a captivating, grim mystery on the surface, Chapman utilizes razor-sharp precision and timing to expose the human condition in its rawest form, squirming deep beneath your skin. It’s an unsettling story that leaves us with more questions about the voids we choose to fill, the answers we give ourselves.
Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman releases on September 24th from Bad Hand Books.
To support Bad Hand Books, order from them directly at this link: https://badhandbooks.com/preorders/kill-your-darling-paperback-with-signed-bookplate
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