Dan Krzyzkowski's Blog

The Silent Patient - A Review

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Alex Michaelides's "The Silent Patient" is a worthwhile and engaging read. It is a good book that comes close to being an excellent book. Alicia Berenson is a successful painter living in London with her husband, Gabriel, a fashion photographer. From the outside looking in, they have a perfect marriage. That is, until Alicia fires five rounds into her husband's face after he arrives home from work one night. Alicia is declared unfit to stand trial and is remanded to the Grove, a psychiatric unit in North London. She never speaks again.

First-person protagonist Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who leaps at the opportunity to treat Alicia. Several years after the highly-publicized murder, Theo transfers to the Grove. He is determined to rescue Alicia, to bring her out of her shell--to get her to talk again.

Theo is an artfully flawed character with a bruised past. Mr. Michaelides delves generously into Theo's childhood trauma, suffered at the hands of his father. The prose here is smart and yet patient, painting an eloquent portrait. The author describes how Theo met and fell in love with his wife, Kathy. The writing in the early chapters of the book is efficient and polished, and easily the novel's best prose.

As Theo begins his therapy sessions with Alicia (which basically entails him speaking and her sitting silently), it occurred to me that the story could go in many different directions. But it falls into a familiar murder-mystery formula, with Theo traveling around interviewing friends and family members of Alicia in attempts to unearth information about her past. Many of the book's chapters are annoyingly short, not allowing the narrative within each chapter to build momentum.

As the story progresses, Theo's home life begins to unravel. He discovers that Kathy, the love of his life, is having an affair. He begins tailing her as she goes off on her adulteristic escapades. He ultimately witnesses his wife engaging in sex acts with her illicit lover. Interestingly, Theo never confronts Kathy on her cheating ways, and seems rather content to ride out what is now a dead marriage. Would a normal man do this? Probably not. But Theo, I had to remind myself, was not a "normal" man. He'd been emotionally abused as a child, and the author may in fact have described a perfectly reasonable response for someone in Theo's position.

Meanwhile, Theo continues to learn more about Alicia--especially when she hands him her diary. It details her increasingly harried life the days and weeks leading up to the murder of her husband. She describes being watched and followed by a strange, nameless man. Gabriel clearly does not believe her. He thinks Alicia is displaying paranoid behavior and implores her to see a doctor.

The great narrative drive of "The Silent Patient" is our anticipation that Alicia will one day speak. That she'll open up to Theo and divulge what really happened the night of her husband's murder. I will say that she does eventually talk to Theo, but I won't say any more.

The book has a twist, of course, and its rendering is where the story suffers. A twist is a form of literary deception, and in this case the deception goes too far. It pertains to the chronology of one of the subplots--namely, that in which Theo discovers his wife is cheating on him. The reader processes this narrative as though it is occurring in real time with the rest of the story. Discovering that it wasn't was disconcerting--I was forced to think backwards and recalibrate the story's timelines. I was left a bit confused and feeling like I was lied to.

That said, the author wraps up the story very well. All the loose ends are neatly snipped and tied up. The book has a satisfying ending, and I enjoyed reading it.

"The Silent Patient" is an engaging and overall rewarding read. I would recommend it to others, with a caveat concerning the story's chronology.

What do you think?





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Under the Dome - A Review

Under the Dome by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After reading this book, you may never step on an ant again. That's right, an ant.

Consider, for a moment, an ant farm. The clear, plastic housing enables one to observe the ants' behavior. Suppose the ants were given human egos? Suppose it was humans trapped in the ant farm instead of ants?

I present to you Stephen King's mammoth 2009 novel, "Under the Dome." At 1,074 pages, it is his longest and most ambitious book since his 1986 masterpiece, "It." When an invisible force field inexplicably falls over Chester's Mill, residents of the small Maine town find themselves cut off from the outside world. No one knows where this "dome" came from or why it's there. The dome is impenetrable--Air Force missiles do not put a dent in it. The force field extends far underground and reaches thousands of feet into the sky.

Characters like Dale Barbara, a retired Iraq War vet, are trapped inside the dome and ultimately left to fend for themselves. Barbara, the main protagonist in this tale, is pitted against a power-hungry politician named James Rennie, or Big Jim, who I envisioned as an overweight Fred Thompson. Barbara, who works as a short order cook, has and makes during the course of the story many friends in town--people like Rose Twitchell, owner of the local diner; Julia Shumway, owner of the town newspaper; Rusty Everett, a town doctor. Rennie has friends too, many of whom are in his pockets. These include most of the Chester's Mill Police force. There are so many characters in this book that I would need an Excel spreadsheet to list them all. That Mr. King can invent, work with, and keep track of such an ensemble speaks to his creative genius. His peripheral characters have backstories, like Piper Libby, a church reverend who doesn't believe in God; or Andrea Grinnell, the town's Third Selectman, who is trying to kick a drug habit.

King's genius sometimes gets him in trouble. There are parts of this story that drag like a wet towel. "Under the Dome" is in many ways an enormous pot of water that takes forever to come to boil. I have a suspicion that King had a lot of fun writing this--that he himself didn't know what was going to become of some of his characters until pivotal moments leading to their demise or triumph. I got the impression that he "lived in the moment." That is often the best method of storytelling (and typically the most rewarding, from a writer's perspective).

Two days trapped under the dome become four, and then six. The air becomes hot and stale. People start showing up dead under Jim Rennie's thumbprint. Alliances form--the good side and the bad. Dale Barbara and his friends must not only survive Rennie and his evil army, they must also figure out where the dome is being generated and how to stop it.

"Under the Dome" is a long, long, long book. And because I don't wish this to become a long, long, long review, I'm going to stop here. King fans won't be wowed by this one, but neither will they be disappointed.

And they'll likely never step on an ant again. Four stars.







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The Real Deal

A missing writer's wife.
A coveted manuscript.
A deal gone horribly wrong.

My new novel, "The Real Deal," is now available!

"The Wheel of Darkness" - A Review

The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"The Wheel of Darkness" is not the first in the Pendergast series, but it's the first one I've read. Beginning a series in its middle is a step below cardinal sin in my view, but this book was a freebie and its description looked interesting so I thought I'd give it a go.

Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his counterpart, a mysterious and somehow inescapably attractive younger woman named Constance Greene, visit a remote monastery deep in the Tibetan mountains. There they learn that the monastery's most prized artifact has been recently stolen--an object called the "Agozyen." The Agozyen, whatever it is, has the power to wreak destruction on the planet. Pendergast and Greene are charged with the task of tracking down the thief, recovering the Agozyen, and hence returning it to the monastery before it is too late.

How does somebody get the name Aloysius?

The alleged thief's name is Jordan Ambrose, and Pendergast, traveling from China to Venice to London, quickly begins tracking him down. The FBI agent soon discovers Ambrose's brutally murdered body--minus the Agozyen--in a hotel room. The Agozyen's original thief has been killed, and now lies in the hands of an unknown subsequent thief. What might thief #2 have in store for the Agozyen? What is the Agozyen, anyway? What does it look like? Why is it so powerful?

Brilliant sleuth that he is, Pendergast quickly determines that thief #2 has boarded a luxury cruise ship named the Britannia, slated to sail from Southampton in the UK to New York. The Britannia is the largest ocean liner ever to grace the open seas, and this happens to be its maiden voyage. Pendergast and Greene board the ship at the last moment, joining its four thousand passengers for what is sure to be a harrowing journey across the Atlantic.

Aloysius? Really?

The stage is set. The rest of the story plays out on the Britannia, with Pendergast and Greene trying to uncover the identity of thief #2 before the ship reaches America. It isn't long before people begin showing up dead. Indeed, I braced myself for an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, on a luxury liner instead of a train. "The Wheel of Darkness" doesn't quite play out that way. Authors Preston and Child branch out too far and wide into sub-stories of peripheral characters, most of whom are crew members. This detracts from the story's main point of interest--the search for the Agozyen and our yearning to know what it is. Near the end of the story--following a mutiny wherein the ship's commodore has been removed, then replaced by the staff captain who later goes crazy and locks herself on the bridge, setting the ship on a course of destruction--Pendergast's main character status falls to the wayside, replaced by First Officer Gordon LeSeur, who is desperately trying to regain control of the ship before the lunatic staff captain can run it aground. All hell has pretty much broken loose at this point. In addition to the murders, the ship's corridors are being haunted by a "tulpa," an undefined, nebulous being that seems to me a hybrid of the smoke ghost from the TV series "Lost" and Harry Potter's dementors (in fairness, I don't know which of the three stories came first).

If I ever acquire a cat, I think I'll name it Aloysius.

As for the Agozyen: I am not going to tell you what it is or how it works. You will have to make that discovery on your own. "The Wheel of Darkness" in many ways reminded me of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." I was engrossed in "The Da Vinci Code" early on, before I learned the nature of the object being sought (in film and fiction, this object is sometimes referred to as the "McGuffin"). I lost some interest when I discovered the object to be the Holy Grail, as this was a story I'd read before, and I lost more interest when the grail turned out to be not a chalice, but a corpse (really, what were any of the characters going to do with a pile of bones?). I will tell you, "The Wheel of Darkness" has a somewhat better payoff.

Authors Preston and Child are adept writers who know how to build tension and create characters. Admittedly, the name Aloysius grew on me throughout my reading of this book, and I'm interested in knowing more about him. I'm especially interested in knowing more about Constance Greene. That said, I may have to pick up more of Preston and Child's books in the near future. I promise I'll start at the beginning.



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"East" - A Review

East by Kirk Kjeldsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kirk Kjeldsen is a master of the short novel. His latest book, "East," is the most literary of his four works, and one I highly recommend. Fourteen-year-old Job Hammon lives in a not-too-distant dystopian future in which America has fallen from power, replaced by industrialized nations like China and Africa. When he discovers his mother is still alive and living somewhere in China, Job decides to leave his home in the Pacific Northwest on a quest to find her.

Readers may initially be reminded of McCarthy's 2006 novel, "The Road." Kjeldsen's "East," however, bleak as it is, holds out more hope for its characters than McCarthy's does. Job weathers several months at sea in the hull of a cargo vessel before arriving on China's not-so-sultry shores. There, he ekes out a ratty existence as a slave laborer, hopping from one factory to another. The author describes China with the intimate knowledge of one who has been there, and with a keen awareness of a world that might someday be. Mr. Kjeldsen knows all too well how difficult life is for many. Few things come easily for the characters of "East" and readers alike. Many of our most fervently-pursued dreams are never realized, and those that are rarely turn out precisely as planned.

This story truly grew on me as I read it. In some ways, those are the best kinds of books. Kjeldsen's "East" shines through its ability to mirror the random vagaries of our own lives. Job's quest to find his mother may be a lifelong journey. He may in fact find her, and later wish he hadn't. But life still happens along the way--for the book's characters and for us. Five stars.



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"The Depths" - A Review

The Depths by Kirk Kjeldsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kirk Kjelden's third novel is a thrill-ride that will keep readers guessing. Marah and Eden Lenaerts' dream vacation to Malaysia takes a nightmare turn when the married couple is kidnapped and dragged to a jungle island, where they are held for ransom. The kidnappers' goal is to extract two million dollars from Marah's wealthy stepfather.

As with Mr. Kjeldsen's previous novels, "The Depths" is set in a foreign country (outside the U.S.). The author describes local settings with the assurance of one who has traveled to such places. His grasp of endemic flora and fauna is impressive, to say the least. One of Mr. Kjeldsen's great talents is utilizing local wildlife to help set a scene. He opens Chapter 9 with the following paragraph:


"At night, the jungle came alive again with a myriad of sounds. Primates chattered high up in the trees; birds cried out in the darkness, sometimes answered by others, and sometimes not. A flying fox screeched past overhead and went crashing through the foliage, grabbing for low-hanging fruit with its clawed thumbs. Beneath it all, a constant chittering of centipedes, roaches, and other insects scratched away like the string section of an orchestra."


The story is narrated in a third-person limited point-of-view. It is Marah's story, and the reader stays on her shoulder throughout. Marah is a perpetually anxious and often unconfident woman who has suffered several miscarriages. Her marriage to Eden is stable, at best, though it is clear the honeymoon is well over. Marah has lived a life fettered in shackles of doubt, and many readers will identify with her daily self-esteem struggles. A portion of her crippling self-doubt stems from a strained childhood relationship with her mother, but the majority is a direct result of her inability to have a child. And so "The Depths," really, is not only a story of a man and woman being held hostage; it is that of a woman who has been a hostage for most of her life, and in one of the worst places--her own mind. In order to free herself from a life or death situation on a jungle island in the middle of nowhere, Marah must first scratch and claw her way out of her own self-made prison, and become the capable, confident woman she has long desired to be. Her will to survive, she'll discover, is a lot stronger than she ever thought.

I won't tell you what happens on that deserted jungle island, but I'll say this: a lot can happen in the middle of nowhere. Read "The Depths," by Kirk Kjeldsen.



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Just After Sunset - A Review

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Only SK would write a story about a man trapped in a Port-O-San. A Port-O-San lying on its side with the door facing down. The only way out might be through the toilet hole and into the holding tank. Yeah. How badly would you want to get out and what lengths of disgusting would you endure in order to live? Such is the scenario faced by a character in "A Very Tight Place," the final short story in King's collection, "Just After Sunset."

I've never thought the short story to be King's best medium, but I rather enjoyed this collection. He's written some bad ones, sure. But he's written a lot of good ones, and even some great ones. "The Reaper's Image" from his 1985 collection, "Skeleton Crew," is an example of the latter. "Quitters, Inc." and "The Last Rung on the Ladder" ("Night Shift") are gems. "Riding the Bullet" ("Everything's Eventual") might be his best.

"Just After Sunset" opens with a tale entitled "Willa." Here we meet a group of abandoned passengers waiting at a defunct station for a train we somehow know isn't coming. That the passengers may or may not be dead is yet to be determined. This is a story of love transcending death.

"The Gingerbread Girl" is about a woman running away. Following the death of her baby, the female character becomes obsessed with running. One day she runs out of her house, and out of her marriage. She travels to south Florida, where she finds herself running from a psychopathic killer along a deserted stretch of Gulf beach. How far must she run in order to free herself?

"Mute" is another good story here. A traveling salesman whose marriage is on the rocks (and whose wife is probably on her way to jail) picks up a hitchhiker, who happens to be deaf and mute. The salesman spills his guts to his passenger, taking comfort in the notion that the hitchhiker can't hear a word of what is being said. We all need someone to talk to every now and then; even a deaf person can lend an ear. Turns out, of course, the hitchhiker isn't deaf and hears every word the traveling salesman tells him.

"Graduation Afternoon" is also worth reading. In this short tale, a female teenage character comes to discover that her everyday, real-world issues suddenly pale in comparison to the mushroom cloud that suddenly obliterates the New York skyline...and the incinerating fire storm racing toward her.

There are more stories to be found here, including "Ayana," "The Cat From Hell," and "Rest Stop." But I will let you discover them yourself.





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"The Secret History" - A Review

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Have you ever finished a book and wondered if, somehow, you missed the point? Sometimes a reader must ask, "Where is the story? What story, exactly, is the author attempting to tell?" The story doesn't always exist where we believe it to be, and discovering its whereabouts can be one of reading's great joys. Having finished Donna Tartt's "The Secret History", however, I must say I'm scratching my head. I scratched my head through much of its 524 pages.

"The Secret History" had been on my radar for quite a long time, and I finally got around to reading it. It is a very long book encapsulating what is essentially a very small story. It is narrated by 1st-person protagonist Richard Papen, a student at Vermont's Hampden College. A wanderlust personality with a questionable self-esteem, Richard is captivated by a small enclave of Greek-studying students taught by Classics professor Julian Morrow. Julian has a class of five, and it is with great reluctance that Richard is allowed to join. An air of mystery surrounds the controversial professor and his small entourage of students. The book first struck me as a "secret society" story, as its title seems to indicate, but it is really nothing of the sort.

The other five members of Julian's class are well-to-do, wise-beyond-their-years young adults who spend much of their time smoking, drinking, and frolicking at an unused house in the countryside. They include Henry, Francis, Edmund (nicknamed "Bunny"), and a pair of brother-sister twins, Charles and Camilla. The skinny of it is this: while attempting to reenact an ancient Greek bacchanal, four of the group's members--Henry, Francis, Charles and Camilla--inadvertently murder a farmer in the Vermont woods. This Greek ritual, a form of madness, entails participants becoming excessively drunk, then devolving into an animal-like state and running for miles, unconscious, through the woods. I found it a fascinating topic, and wish Ms. Tartt had made it more a focal point of the story.

Bunny--as the first half of the book progresses, this class member seems to become something of an outcast--eventually discovers what his classmates have done. Bunny has a penchant for shooting his mouth off, and the only way to silence him is to murder him. This is accomplished at the book's midpoint; it happens off-screen and without fanfare (Henry and the others push him off a cliff, to his death). Ms. Tartt is an immensely talented wordsmith. On page 261, she writes:

A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

There is little suspense leading up to the murder, and little suspense after. In fact, looking back, the story failed to galvanize itself in any suspenseful fashion whatever. There was no sense of momentum gathering, building to a high point (aside, perhaps, from Julian eventually learning what his students had done), from which a climactic wave might crest, then fall. Many of the characters spend much of the rest of the book drunk, stoned, or both. Perhaps the real story here is the dissolution of the friendships among the five remaining classmates; the dissolution of the characters themselves--as people, as human beings. Charles becomes a full-blown alcoholic; Francis suffers from panic disorder-like symptoms, and even attempts suicide at the book's end; Henry becomes stoic and uncommunicative. I suppose Ms. Tartt succeeds in illustrating what committing murder (of the farmer, to be sure; but, more notably, of Bunny) can do to the perpetrator(s), but there is just too little connective tissue holding this tale together for my tastes. I've always thought of stories as individual engines, and this one doesn't rev very high.

As an aside, and in conclusion, I've moved on to "Just After Sunset", a collection of short stories by Stephen King, one of my favorite authors. The first story in this set is a gem entitled "Willa". In the first 10 pages, I am more interested in learning who Willa is and why she left the train station than I was about any of the characters in "The Secret History" throughout my reading of it. To each his own, I guess.



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New Book!

One roadtrip. Two stories. One terrifying secret.

My new novel, "Critical Mass", is available today through all booksellers.

"Land of Hidden Fires" - A Review

Land of Hidden Fires by Kirk Kjeldsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When 15 year-old Kari Dahlstrom sees an allied war plane go down over the mountains not far from her home, visions of sugar plums go dancing through her head. Kari lives with her widower father, Erling, on their failing farm, where they mete out a meager existence. The year is 1943, and their home country of Norway is under Nazi control. Thus begins Kirk Kjeldsen's second published novel...and the mystery of the hidden fires.

Against her father's wishes, Kari sets out to locate the downed plane. Strong-willed and idealistic, she dreams of a life in America. She likens the American pilot to Hollywood movie stars about which she has read and heard. The pilot's name is Lance Mahurin. Kari tells him she is a member of the resistance, and offers to take him to Sweden. Her hope, of course, is that Lance will fall in love with her along the way. They set off on a dangerous, grueling journey through the Norwegian back country, braving frozen rivers and cold nights.

Back on the farm, Kari's father, Erling, soon discovers his daughter's absence. Realizing Kari has run off in search of the plane, Erling sets out on an aging mule to find her. He soon comes upon the wreckage, where he finds two sets of tracks heading away from the farm, toward Sweden. A recalcitrant, straitlaced man who remains tormented by his wife's death, Erling pursues Kari and the American pilot. Erling knows he must track down his daughter before she reaches the border, or before the Nazis reach her first.

Nazi Oberleutnant Conrad Moltke would much rather be proving himself on the front lines of battle than babysitting in Norway. When Moltke is given the order to retrieve the downed American pilot--and the girl said to be helping him--he takes to the hills to ruthlessly hunt them down. A chain-smoking egotist, Moltke will stop at nothing to achieve his goal, and plans to use the pilot's capture to secure his transfer to the front lines.

Thus sets the stage for an exciting showdown in the Norwegian highlands. Not all of the characters' agendas are plainly visible on the outside, but on the inside their hidden fires burn hot, urging them forward like self-propelled engines. The greatest battle takes place inside Kari, perhaps, where naivete confronts reality, forcing her to make a decision she never sees coming.

"Land of Hidden Fires" is a story not to be missed. I highly recommend it.



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