He can't shake that sensation of being watched by someone you don't know. The feeling that a hidden presence is nearby while your eyes are closed, observing, leaning closer, emanating ill will.Ill Will is a book crammed full of interesting ideas and situations, and while it had the potential to make for some mindless, trashy fun, it pretty much collapses under the weight of its ambition and fizzles out to an unsatisfactory ending. It'll fill the empty hours without leaving anything of itself behind, and there's a market for that.
Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination – that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams.I was struck by this line – I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars – because I just referred to myself the other day as “someone from the 80s” (to someone younger who found that to be a strange way to refer to myself), so I will share here: As someone from the 80s, I remember watching Oprah on TV as she revealed memories of childhood abuse that she had repressed for years. As to this widespread repressed-memories phenomenon, Oprah concluded, “When someone asks you if you were abused as a child, the only two possible responses are, 'Yes and I don't know'.” I remember that flooring me at the time, and as this was the era of children under hypnosis telling lurid tales of satanic/sexual abuse occurring at their day cares, we were all primed to believe that anything was possible. And this is a central theme in Ill Will: As a child in the 80s, Dustin Tillman lost his parents, aunt, and uncle in a grisly mass murder with satanic overtones. He studied Psychology at college, eventually becoming an expert witness in satanic ritual and the retrieval of repressed memories through hypnosis – receiving his PhD just as both of his areas of expertise were being exposed as nonsense. Now a therapist/life coach who uses hypnosis to help his patients stop smoking or relieve psychosomatic pain, when Dustin learns that the man who had been sent away for life for the murder of his family has been released by the efforts of the Innocence Project, he needs to reexamine his own memories from that time. The irony in this situation had so much potential (even if Gillian Flynn already covered the falsely-imprisoned-satanic-killer idea in Dark Places).
No doubt this must happen to everyone at a certain age: You look up for a moment and you're not sure which life is real. You've split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other – all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of thought, and each one thinks of its self as me.As Dustin is focussing on the past in his personal life, a new case presents itself to him professionally: Aqil Ozorowski is a former cop who is obsessing over the idea of an at-large serial killer; sharing dossiers of information on officially unrelated deaths between which only he can see the connections. As Dustin finds himself being drawn in by Aqil's logic and evidence, their relationship crosses strict therapist-patient boundaries, and there are parallels drawn between modern day serial killer hysteria and the satanic ritual scare of the 80s. This idea – that as with the constellations, humans are conditioned to find patterns where none actually exist – was another theme that was dangled and then incompletely explored.
I did like the way that the narrative jumped back and forth between the present and the late 70s; dishing out the past slowly enough that the tension of a mystery was maintained. I liked the image of the drug dealer and self-declared vampire “sipping from the aura” of his customers; and also how this parallels a discussion of torture-killers feeding off the energy from their victims; and how this parallels a young woman declaring that her boyfriend won't be drained by family drama anymore. But author Dan Chaon made some other, less satisfying, choices. I found it annoying near the beginning when there would be extra spaces after a sentence in a paragraph, and I wondered if that was just sloppy typesetting (as the book has justified margins). But it didn't happen in every paragraph, and as the book goes on and Dustin gets more and more spacey, he begins to leave sentences and paragraphs unfinished, in his thoughts and in his speech, and I realised that these early extra spaces must have been intentional; and that's even more annoying to me. Chaon also uses another device late in the book that seemed to come out of nowhere: dividing pages into two or three columns and having several characters tell their stories concurrently (it wasn't a bad tool, it just came late and then was used only twice). And there was an inconsistency to the way that Dustin used jargon in his thoughts (someone late in the book notes that as a kid Dustin had an impressive vocabulary, but that's never shown in the flashback scenes). Sometimes his knowledge would be shared with the reader organically and added interest:
It made me think of the neurology class I took in college, the professor talking about eingengrau – intrinsic gray, brain gray. It was the color you “saw” when light was totally absent, a kind of visual noise, like snow static on a television. That was the color of the sky above us.And sometimes knowledge was just stuck in jarringly:
She had the fingers of a severe onychophagiac. It was the kind of nail-biting that seemed like the sign of an impulse-control disorder.More than one character begins to talk about astral projection late in the book, and I watched enough Oprah and read enough Sybil-type books back in the 80s to understand that abused children are said to mentally leave their bodies – and is this what Chaon is saying is happening to Dustin every time his mind wanders and he leaves a sentence uncompleted? (That was never made clear but for the longest time I worried that this book was going to take a Fight Club turn.) And then the solutions to the mysteries and the actual ending...so unsatisfying. I don't regret reading this book, exactly, but three stars can be considered a rounding up.
Two further notes: I remember driving somewhere with my Mum back in the day and telling her what Oprah had said about repressed memories, “When someone asks you if you were abused as a child, the only two possible responses are, 'Yes and I don't know'.” I said this in a wide-eyed, "Can you imagine this is happening all the time out there?" kind of a way. And she sighed and replied, "It happens more than you know. It wasn't that long ago that I remembered that when I was a little girl and played over at the house of (some friend, I can't remember the name), she had a father that was always laying on the couch with a blanket over him. He didn't work, he wasn't a well man, and he was always just laying there when I'd go to play. Well, we'd be running around, and he'd often say to me, 'Let's play hide and seek', and he'd hide me under the blanket with him. And I know now that what happened wasn't right, but at the time I thought it was a game. And I don't know if this was a repressed memory, exactly, but it just popped into my mind for the first time in the longest time, and for the first time, I realised that it was wrong." I was so gobsmacked by this story that I didn't ask her for any more details - I was all, "Gosh, can you imagine?" and now I didn't want to imagine what happened under that blanket - but this is what was at the edge of my thoughts throughout this book: there certainly were false memories implanted by well-meaning therapists, but not all recovered memories are false memories.
And, as I wrote about once, when my older brother ran away from home as a teenager in the 80s, it was with another troubled kid who liked to blast heavy metal and play with satanic ritual. So that was on my mind, too: kids were being influenced by all this talk of satanism, and while I'm pretty sure there were never any sacrifices to Beelzebub at day care centres, there were plenty of pentagrams traced in the dirt by the roadside.
