Blood Harmonies

STOP ME by Richard Jay Parker

In the interests of sanity preservation, I have learned to avoid reading things which are designed keep me lying awake listening for crowbars against doorjambs in the night.  So, under normal circumstances, just seeing the cover of Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker would have been enough to make me shiver and look away now.

Fortunately, instead of spotting Stop Me on one of the tables at the front of the shop, I came to it via word-of-mouth (or word-of-tweet to be more precise).  The concept struck me as so breathtaking that I probably would have bought it even if it came with a free boiled jawbone (trust me, this is not as random a promotional idea as it sounds).

The core idea is simple.  You know those annoying emails you get telling you forward them on to ten of your pals, or else suffer an eternity of bad luck?  Well, what if you weren’t the one who was going to suffer?  What if the email said:

howdy doody

on vacation

slim, attractive, dreadlocked babe with a fun sticky-out bellybutton, likes rabbit fur

forward this email to ten friends
each of those friends must forward it to ten friends

maybe one of those friends of friends of friends will be one of my friends

if this email ends up in my inbox within a week I won’t slit the bitch’s throat

can you afford not to send this on to ten friends?

Vacation Killer

Without wishing to front-load this with spoilers, let’s just say not enough people hit ‘forward’…

I’ve seen other reviews which compared Richard Jay Parker to Harlan Coben, and I think in terms of pacing, and plotting, this comparison is more than fair. Stop Me starts out as a rollercoaster, and then pretty much keeps on cranking it up all the way.  You are given time to catch your breath, but as soon as you notice this happening you’ve got a line or two before something twists again to make you think, uh-oh.

However, it strikes me that there are some key respects, in which comparisons to Harlan Coben are selling Stop Me short.

The first is that, while reading Harlan Coben can certainly be diverting, never have I ever come away feeling I’m being invited to think much beyond what’s on the page. But by taking the more inane sides of our online habits and pushing them to violent extremes, Parker is asking us to consider several wider questions about the way we live now.

One of the things which normally puts me off serial killer books (apart from the whole anti-female grim violence which thankfully we are spared having to wallow in here) is that things have a way of falling apart and stretching suspension of disbelief to breaking point as soon as we start hearing the killers’ side of the equation. The problem is that because what they are doing is inevitability so deranged it is impossible to identify with, or accept as plausible in any way.  Again, I’m trying to swerve spoilers here, but what saved the bad guys in Stop Me from falling into this trap is the way they are portrayed as a product of our audience expectation.  The idea of a serial killer with an online marketing strategy is so out there that somehow you can kind of imagine it happening.

From reading other reviews of Stop Me, I know most readers have been particularly intrigued with Bookwalter and the way he’s turned serial killing into a cottage industry, but to me, it is Leo’s inner life and the way Parker gets us to feel Leo’s profound sense of anguish and loss when his wife Laura goes missing which really singles Stop Me out.  Although some of the things which were happening to Leo were a bit of a stretch for me, I can’t think of when I’ve read a more absorbing emotional experience in a crime novel.  Never once did I stop believing in Leo (although I did want to shake him at one point towards the end when he goes to see Ashley…I’ll leave you to work out why).

This is another key difference between Parker and the writers he’s being compared to on Amazon.  For while I can enjoy the pacing and twists of the Harlan Coben style novel, I never quite shake the feeling that I am reading about unlikely things which are happening to imaginary Americans.   But thankfully, there is nothing mawkish about Stop Me, no tugging at heartstrings or attempts to be a Gillette ad made prose.  Instead, it’s honest, crisp and pacey, and full of food for thought.

Next time I see a Richard Jay Parker title with an overtly violent looking cover, I won’t let this stop me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 13:26 and is filed under It's dark o'clock in the morning again. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.