Andrew Pyper | The Remainder Table

From the VPL Fall 2013 Book Sale.

Read in December 2013.

I picked this up at the book sale because I’d been hearing Andrew Pyper’s name a lot—not for this book, but for his most recent one. So I had no idea what this was about, but I had some vague idea that he wrote mystery/thriller-type books, which seemed promising.

The Killing Circle opens with a prologue. The protagonist’s son vanishes at a drive-in movie. Then the story flashes back in time four years to explain the events leading up to the son’s disappearance.

Journalist Patrick Rush has always wanted to write a novel, but can’t think of anything to write about. Though he works for a newspaper (the “National Star”) and writes for a living, he considers himself a failure as a writer because he hasn’t written a novel. That said, he’s not actually that interested in writing (i.e. being a writer); he wants to have written (i.e. to be an author). His best quality is his self-awareness regarding this distinction.

He hates his job. He used to write about books, but now the paper has him writing about TV (under the byline “The Couch Potato”), which he considers beneath him. Pop culture, blech! Writing about pop culture, double blech! Whatever, dude. I’ll take your job. Pop culture, yay! Writing about pop culture, double yay!

Patrick is a single father, his wife having died shortly after his son’s birth. In the beginning, he doesn’t explain how she died, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. His son is four in the flashback, eight in the present time period of the story.

He sees a classified ad for a writing circle and calls the number. The man who answers mysteriously gives him an address and not much other info. He waffles about attending, but of course ends up going and finds himself in a room with a motley assortment of characters, each one weirder than the next. They introduce themselves. The next week they are to bring a piece of writing. Patrick, naturally, can’t think of anything to write about. He dashes off a crappy paragraph at the last minute. The others read their stories, all weakly-disguised memoir, and none particularly intriguing to Patrick except one. One story he’s transfixed by. He has a tape recorder in his pocket and presses record while the woman reads.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. It has all these elements that seem like things that would coalesce into a book I’d love, and yet…

Partly it’s that I spent the majority of the book thinking “this isn’t going to turn into an undead thing is it?” Eventually it became clear that it wasn’t, at which point I was immensely relieved, but it was too late, I think. I’d spent far too long wondering if ghosts or zombies were going to appear the next time I turned the page. I expect I’d have had a different experience if this hadn’t been my first book by this author, but as first-time reader, it read like he wanted readers to believe there was going to be a supernatural element.

And then there’s Patrick, who is a whiny malcontent. Yes, his wife died, but everything else about his character is so grating it cancels out any sympathy that may have generated. He’s just a miserable person. Which would be fine, if the story made me care about what happened to him regardless of his unpleasantness (it didn’t) or he was interesting enough that his unpleasantness didn’t matter (he wasn’t). The writing, on the other hand, was fine. And here I must invoke the Dan Brown thread: story/character will always win over writing.

I will say the ending was satisfying in that cheesy-TV-movie kind of way where you end up rooting for the villain because the protagonist is so unintentionally annoying.

Hmm. It occurs to me I may have found this a more compelling story with a different point-of-view character. Maybe told from the villain’s perspective. I had way more empathy for the antagonist (whose actions were evil, but underlying motivations had gray areas that could have been explored). Or maybe omniscient, get into everyone’s heads. Perhaps it was not the best choice to have the character who keeps saying he has no story to tell—who bores himself—tell the story.