Add Some Fava Beans to the Pot, Clarice, You’ve Got Company!: Barry Lyga’s I Hunt Killers

The title pretty much says it all with this book: I Hunt Killers. And Barry Lyga makes sure to remind us that his protagonist, Jasper Dent–self-absorbed high school student/son of famous serial killer William Dent–really, really wants to do that. Over. And over. And Over again. Yet despite this, Mr. Lyga hooks the reader immediately in the complex psychological debates that Jazz finds himself fighting through daily, the compromises that he makes to continue his daily existence and the routines he’s created to make the days less painful.

The story is pretty intriguing on the surface: Jazz is basically raising himself following the arrest and imprisonment of his father, killer of 123(4?) people over his killing lifetime. Big daddy Dent is smart, calculating, cold as ice and just as heartless. But he does have a soft spot for his son, whom he raised to learn the family trade: killing. So, after his father’s arrest by the local sheriff, Jazz is (understandably) a social pariah, hounded by the media, lost and alone (his mother “disappeared” years before) and is left with little by way of a support system, other than his best friend, Howie, and his girlfriend, Connie.

In his spare time, he apparently sneaks into the  sheriff’s office and the morgue and pretty much anywhere else he fancies, using the skills his father taught him for breaking and entering. With a new killer presumably on the loose in the town, Jazz is convinced the murderer’s a serial killer and reaches a near-panicked feverish pitch in his need to assist in catching the murderer.

Now, I can think of quite a few teenage boys who would love nothing more than to take some of their spare time and investigate crimes/murders, but Jazz’s desire to do so reaches an almost feverish pitch. As noted, he’s got more than a few issues that he’s working out, not the least of which being just how much of his genetic/mental/psychological/emotional make up comes thanks to dad.

As a character, Jazz is an interesting one. He’s more intense than Thomas in James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, but in many ways just as smart and willing to put himself out on a limb, eyes on the prize, without thinking twice. However, he’s on constant psychological ice, trying to decide how best to present himself and then questioning what it means that he’s stopping to ask himself that. In some ways, he kind of reminded me of Harry Potter in the later books, when he becomes darker, more inwardly turned and moodier, yet still avidly concerned about his friends. He’s definitely dynamic, which keeps the story moving!

Here’s What I Liked About the Book:
1. Jasper’s a pretty smart dude, and doesn’t need to rely on fart jokes or bodily part references to make himself heard. He’s attentive and loyal to those who are loyal to him, which is a trait that comes across repeatedly as missing in representations of teens boys in YA Lit. Notably, he’s also highly manipulative–and knows it. While I can’t say I particularly enjoy this as a trait in, say, a new friend or co-worker, I can say that I think it’s an interesting plot twist in and of itself.

2. We get *a lot* on Jazz’s inner workings and turmoil over the course of the narrative. I actually think this is a good thing and, again, something that we tend not to see too much of in YA Lit males.

3. Mr. Lyga did his research for this one, clearly. There’s quite a bit of very good and very detailed information out there about serial killers, sociopaths, psychopaths, etc. to dig through, but you have to be willing to do just that: dig through it. He did, and it pays off in spades here.

4. When we talk about the reinvention of the YA Thriller, this, my friends, is what we need to see more of. It’s not the oh-no-we’re-trapped-in-an-abandoned-carnival (a la Laurie Stolarz’s Welcome to the Dark House). Nor is it the oh-woops-I-can’t-remember-what-happened-when-I-was-attached-and-now-don’t-get-my-boyfriend (a la Jennifer Armentrout’s Don’t Look Back). It’s taking the inner workings of an adult thriller and turning them upside down and letting the YA Lit reader enjoy the mystery and emotion that makes classics like Silence of the Lambs classics.

5. Even aside from Jazz, the characters all seemed dynamic and interesting. None of them were truly one-note, and all of them added to the tension and movement of the plot line to both build the drama as well as minimize the craziness of Jazz’s lifestyle.

What I Didn’t Love About It:

1. Ok. NO WAY will the police involve a teen–especially a teen with a history of a sociopathic, serial killer dad that he’s still recovering from–assist in an investigation. Period. Liability being the very least of the relevant related issues with that.

2. NO WAY would Jazz be allowed so many “chances” to stay out of the way, either. Breaking and entering into the morgue? Stealing confidential files? Contaminating crime scenes and evidence? NO WAY.

3. Equally unbelievable is the idea that Jazz would have just stayed where he was after dad’s arrest. Especially with the media zoo he references and the looks/whispers/rumors/etc that he repeatedly notes are floating around about him. What kind of life is that?

4. Nor do I fully buy the idea that he’s been living with senile/mildly dangerous grandma, being visited apparently with some regularity by a social worker, and she doesn’t pick up on just how senile grandma is. Granted, Jazz is a manipulator and we see how he strong arms the social worker into hearing out his case and sympathizing with him, but still. Not buying it.

5.  While Jazz does make for an interesting and sympathetic protagonist, holy crap can he be self absorbed! At multiple points in the story I found myself rolling my eyes over some of the crap he was belaboring–and actually found myself cheering Connie for giving him the verbal smack down (though I have my doubts about her willingness to date him, as well).

6. There are a number of strings left untied, build-ups left open, questions left unanswered. Presumably this is because the author builds the tension in the last third of the book with an eye towards book two in the series, but it feels a little sloppy nonetheless.

Overall:

The story sucks you in at the beginning and largely delivers on what it promises. This is the first book of a series, and it definitely read like it was. There are a number of strange plot holes/missing answers to questions. What you do get by the end, though, is an interestingly twisted tale.

Anyone else out there a fan of thrillers? Interested in this series?

Welcome Back, YA Crime Thriller: Jennifer Armentrout’s Don’t Look Back

Did anyone else in their younger years spend quite a bit of time reading the 1990’s versions of “scary” YA Lit? The Christopher Pike/Diane Hoh/R.L. Stine versions? These books had a fairly set style of dealing with the scary: set up the characters, learn a bit of their history, have some scary things happen to them, resolve the scary things/mystery in the last 1-2 chapters of the book, move on to the next. May or may not include an epilogue letting you, the reader, see that the protagonist is free to hang out with friends again and/or that whatever the Big Bad is, it has moved on to another victim.

These books were an obsession of mine back in the day for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that they were all written as classic page-turners: they were all action, constant thrills and chills, and there was invariably some little surprise morsel at the very end. Someone smarter than I (and less willing to suspend disbelief) would probably complain as to their predictability or lameness or some such. And to be fair, read through the eyes of someone 25 years older/farther along in the future, well, I’m not sure they’re not right.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t serve as a great gateway read and make for just as much lunch table conversation as, I suppose, what was on tv last night does now.

When I picked up Jennifer Armentrout’s Don’t Look Back, I was curious about where it was going to go. A classic who-done-it mystery, tinged with that 90’s YA Lit spook nostalgia, she does a really impressive job of keeping the story moving, but reinventing the genre as something that a teen of 2014 would read, as opposed to a book-deprived teen of 1994. This is actually really important, particularly as there has been a notable paradigm shift in these genres of YA Lit. I don’t think that horror/thriller YA reads will ever go out of style, nor do I think they should. The age group they’re intended for is right at that point in life where such reading is fascinating, though perhaps not the adult version yet.

Don’t Look Back follows protagonist Sam, a beautiful girl with a seemingly ideal life: an uber-rich family, a perfect boyfriend, a cluster of devoted friends, a closet full of designer clothes, and a ticket to Yale for college. Who wouldn’t want to become this person? Well, that’s what Sam has to ask herself as she emerges from severe amnesia following her disappearance for four days. She can’t remember who she is, who her family or friends are, and certainly not what’s happened to her. She’s plucky in her tenacity to get back into the swing of things, though, and her family is supportive of her reaching out to others in the hopes that it will jog her memory so they can learn what happened, where she might have been.

Why is this so important? Because Sam wasn’t the only one who disappeared then: there was also her best friend, Cassie. Except Cassie didn’t show up again with Sam, and as the days pass, the police become increasingly agitated, with no leads and no idea where they might find her.

Perhaps more important for Sam herself is her adjustment to being, well, Sam. In addition to all the pluses her life offered, she also has some pretty severe negatives: she was an extreme bitch, both terrifying and domineering to her peers; she was a thoughtless sister and daughter, repeatedly disappointing her family; and she was manipulative towards basically everyone she knew, including her family and supposed friends. As Sam tries to sink back into her own skin, she begins to realize that she’s not at heart the person she was before the amnesia occurred. This realization creates it’s own tension in the story, and really builds her up as a dastardly yet sympathetic character.

Here’s What I Liked:

Unlike in the similar books of the early 90’s, Ms. Armentrout has gone out of her way to make this book both applicable and interesting for today’s reader. What does that entail? Quite a few things: creating better and stronger characters; providing both internal and external conflict in and amongst the characters; presenting both a history and a future for them, so they’re not simply in-the-moment flat characters; providing relationships and rapport between them by showing the reader rather than telling them.

Also, I really liked the blend of mystery, thriller and escapist realism (because, let’s face it, how many of us ride around in a Bentley on a daily basis?). The story is fast paced, but unlike the 90’s versions, the author does stop to smell the proverbial roses to let us form an opinion of the characters. They aren’t just bit-players to the action sequences; the characters are the action sequences. I actually thought that she even did a great job of incorporating the whole amnesia situation, creating a tension in and of itself between the old Sam and new Sam.

Finally, I appreciated that the author didn’t take what seems to increasingly be the YA author easy out, Disney style: mom’s dead, and possibly dad’s MIA or dead or away all the time etc, so the child basically just self-governs. Yes, as a writer I understand that this just makes creating the story–especially one that incorporates romance and thrills–so much easier, but it’s kind of a cheat. Especially when the familial absence isn’t an actual part of the plot line, but simply the circumstances in which the character’s brought up. Here, there’s none of that: the author writes Sam a real family, has the parents active in Sam’s life throughout the book, and forces her to face actual consequences for her actions and mistakes.

What I Wasn’t So Keen On:

While there really wasn’t anything in this book that stood out to me as a serious, book-burning, stop-reading flaw, there were definitely a few aspects that raised my eyebrows (literally and proverbially).

First, Sam is a generally well-written female character, aside from the fact that her personality really has a lot of extremes. Because of the trauma she faced and the amnesia she’s dealing with, it seems a bit more acceptable to allow for this, but she is excessively temper-tantrumy in one scene, pathetically scared and demure in another, overly self-conscious in yet another. Aside from making my head spin, I’m not sure what the benefit is to having so many excesses in one character.

Additionally, I really didn’t care for the fact that all of the book’s problems–and I’m not talking about 150-200 page 90’s YA book problems, I’m talking about 369 page 2014 YA book problems–were solved in the last 2 chapters. Seriously: you can literally just read the last two chapters and get the answer to basically every issue posed in the book. Needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway), I kind of thought this was a bit lame. Not because I don’t think she needed to provide answers (absolutely she did) but more because I couldn’t help but compare this (perhaps unfairly) to well-written, similar adult books. In those, I feel as though the answers are presented more as a trickle (and sometimes with further complications and questions raised) throughout the last chapters (plural) of the book. Further, there’s usually at least some amount of explanation as to how the protagonist deals with these problems/solutions, rather than simply providing one or two scenes in the last chapter to answer all remaining points of concern.

Also, the class issues were pretty extreme here, and though I realize that this was done intentionally, it was like the “cool kids” in this town had never actually left it to see or experience any part of the world other than their own little fiefdom. They seem to have no grounding in reality, no sense of morality, no understanding of what is and is not normal in the rest of the world. I think this might have come off as being so extreme because the author really paints everyone one color: you’re good, you’re bad, you’re mean, etc., but I’m pretty certain the picture could have been just as well done with a little balance. Race seems to be presented off-hand, with a Goth kid being made fun of by one of the mean girls and the only Hispanic kid mentioned being the son of Sam’s gardener. At the very, very least, it seems that Sam’s interest in this character is discouraged by her friends and family not because he’s Hispanic, but because his father is a manual laborer. Still, pretty tough to swallow.

Finally, there is the issue of physicality and her relationship with her pre-amnesia boyfriend. How is it that a character with the gumption to walk away from a table of all of her supposed friends in a crowded cafeteria doesn’t have the self-confidence to tell the supposed love of her life to lay off the physical until her memory returns? Why would allowing, and even forcing herself into that position (no pun intended), be something that she would do? And why does this supposed love of her life not seem to be around nearly as much as one would expect, following her four day disappearance and traumatic return?

Overall:

In all, I thought that this was a step in the direction of what YA Lit publishers have suggested an interested in developing: a thriller mystery drama genre for teens. While I’m not actually convinced that this hasn’t already been around for decades now, I appreciate Ms. Armentrout’s work at bringing these reads into the 21st century for us. Overall, it’s a pretty smooth, well-written read, and certainly one that will keep you turning pages, as long as you can make it past the cringe-worthy mean girls, weird boyfriend dynamics and yo-yoing personality of Sam.

What do you think? Anyone read this yet or have an opinion on thriller dramas in YA Lit?

What’s Next?: What to Fear When All Our Fears Have Been Reinvented as Lovestruck Studs

Recently, I was reminded of an article I read many, many moons ago that addressed the trends in what scared the American populace (I recall that the emphasis had, indeed, been placed on the fact that it was only Americans that had been surveyed/documented). There was a period of time in which the trend was ghosts, another with vampires, another with monsters (this was a very vague and broad category, which I interpreted to include monstrous appearing/acting creatures that wouldn’t necessarily be termed monsters if one were being more specific), and aliens.

Intriguing, then, how in YA Lit, we see not only an acceptance of such creatures, but an embracing of them. Forlorn, heartfelt ghosts? Check. Romantic zombie paramours? Check.  Fiery hot demons? Check. Obsessive, lovestruck werewolves? Check. Emotional yet powerful fallen angels? Check. Sultry vampires? HUGE check. (The list goes on and on).

I do note though that I haven’t read anything (YET) that really does a romanticizing of aliens–I suppose the closest would be Stephanie Meyers’s The Host, which I’ve attempted to read on four separate occasions and can never finish, out of sheer boredom. And even then, the aliens are reviled for the most part, with one implanted beast baring human-esque emotional qualities, and so being more broadly accepted as a being as opposed to just a human-skin-suit-wearing parasite.

So I posit this: when everything that used to scare the populace has been reinvented as a misunderstood heartthrob, what will the public be scared of?

Well, what seems to be hitting the YA shelves of bookstores lately (perhaps in response to the 2013 Publisher’s Weekly article in which YA Lit editors were interviewed and bemoaned the lack of Gillian Flynn-style crime thrillers for young adults) seems to be an emphasis on the bad in humans. In those veins, we have Laurie Stolarz’s Welcome to the Dark House, Jennifer Armentrout’s Don’t Look Back, and even Gayle Forman’s If I Stay. I’d add to this category the subcategory of asylum spins in which the sanity of the protagonist has been questioned (I’m thinking alone the lines of the Mara Dyer series, though there is definitely an element of the supernatural there, as well), leading to hospitalization and/or her own ongoing questioning of what really happened/whether she’s responsible for it.

I’m all for it, and find this line of writing fascinating. (Plus, it lets us still be scared of some of those things that go bump in the night. 🙂 )

So what do you think? Excited for the advent of the YA Lit crime thriller? Think that it’s time has already come and gone? Still preferring the supernatural/paranormal hottie YA story?