Ill Will

Starred review from December 5, 2016
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.

Starred review from December 15, 2016
A dark genre-bending thriller that starts with a drowning but widens to encompass murder, cancer, drug addiction, and satanic ritual abuse. Dustin is a Cleveland psychiatrist who's having a rough, creepy year. His wife has died of cancer, and one of his patients is recruiting him to help investigate the drownings of young men that seem to match a pattern. And that's just the stuff he's aware of. Dustin doesn't know that his youngest son, 18-year-old Aaron, is developing a heroin habit in the wake of his mom's death. Nor does he know that Aaron has been talking with Dustin's adopted brother, Rusty, who was convicted for killing Dustin's parents, aunt, and uncle nearly 30 years earlier. Rusty was sent to prison based on circumstantial evidence and Dustin's supposedly repressed memories of witnessing a satanic cult ritual that provoked the massacre. But that devil-made-me-do-it stuff has been debunked, DNA evidence has exonerated Rusty, and Dustin, we learn, was and remains easily persuaded that untrue things are true. Chaon (Stay Awake, 2012, etc.) has a good time with all this bad news, skillfully exploring our unwitting capacity for self-delusion and self-destructive behavior. He does it through conventional novelistic detail (Aaron's slide into addiction is particularly harrowing) and psychological insight, unspooling Dustin's own issues through flashbacks and present-day anxiety. But Chaon also plays with form, at one point splitting Aaron's narrative into first-, second-, and third-person points of view running alongside each other in columns, the better to suggest disconnection from oneself. But this kind of rhetorical somersaulting doesn't interfere with the main narrative, and though the novel at times feels baggy, especially the present-day serial-killer plot, overall Chaon has mastered multiple psychologically complex and often fearsome characters. A shadowy narrative that's carried well by the author's command and insight.

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January 1, 2017
In his first novel in seven years, National Book Award finalist Chaon has created another of those twilight realms of which he is an indisputable master (see the story collection Stay Awake, 2012 ). The book's characters plumb the depths of deception and surpass all established measures of instability and dysfunction. They grapple so ineffectively with issues of loss, grief, displacement, or mere hormonal confusion that they simultaneously contribute to and feed off of shared delusions and imminent peril. Told in many voices through the past and into the present We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves the story runs on two tracks: a family massacre for which an adopted son was falsely imprisoned at the height of the 1980s satanic-cult mania, and an ongoing string of urban legendlike drowning deaths involving drunken college boys. If the definition of eeriness is indeed strange, suspicious, and unnatural, the definers of the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, et al.) have a worthy heir in Dan Chaon.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2016

Following Among the Missing, a National Book Award finalist, Chaon tells the story of conflicted psychologist Dustin Tillman, who lost his parents and his aunt and uncle to a massacre blamed on his foster brother Rusty. Now Rusty's conviction has been overturned, and Dustin ponders his testimony regarding Rusty even as an ex-cop patient draws him into the complexities of several unsolved murders. With a five-city tour.

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2017

In this intensely readable and shadowy novel by Chaon (Await Your Reply), Dustin Tillman is a 40-year-old psychologist who has recently lost his wife to cancer. Dustin is no stranger to tragedy, having lived through the mysterious murder of his parents and relatives many years ago. Now he learns that his adopted brother, Rusty, found guilty of committing those murders, has been released from prison. A former police officer whom Dustin is counseling has involved him in an amateur investigation of the mysterious deaths of local youths in the area. Meanwhile, Rusty has been contacting Dustin's son Aaron, who is struggling with a dangerous drug habit and is just now learning of his father's tragic past. When Dustin loses contact with his son and finds out that he had been in touch with Rusty, he is drawn toward a confrontation that is both horrific and inevitable. VERDICT In this creepy yet fascinating work, with a bleak Ohio wintery landscape as backdrop, Chaon creates a world of tragedy, disease, and drug abuse right out of today's news and makes it real while keeping readers guessing on many levels. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2017

In this intensely readable and shadowy novel by Chaon (Await Your Reply), Dustin Tillman is a 40-year-old psychologist who has recently lost his wife to cancer. Dustin is no stranger to tragedy, having lived through the mysterious murder of his parents and relatives many years ago. Now he learns that his adopted brother, Rusty, found guilty of committing those murders, has been released from prison. A former police officer whom Dustin is counseling has involved him in an amateur investigation of the mysterious deaths of local youths in the area. Meanwhile, Rusty has been contacting Dustin's son Aaron, who is struggling with a dangerous drug habit and is just now learning of his father's tragic past. When Dustin loses contact with his son and finds out that he had been in touch with Rusty, he is drawn toward a confrontation that is both horrific and inevitable. VERDICT In this creepy yet fascinating work, with a bleak Ohio wintery landscape as backdrop, Chaon creates a world of tragedy, disease, and drug abuse right out of today's news and makes it real while keeping readers guessing on many levels. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.