Ill Will by Dan Chaon

Ballantine Books, 496 pages, $17 (c2017)

Dan Chaon uses 496 pages to depict the psychological disintegration of one of his characters. It’s like hearing nails on a chalkboard.

I’m posting “MAJOR SPOILER ALERT” here because I don’t see how I can discuss this book without giving away at least one of the big plot points.

DO NOT PROCEED FURTHER IF YOU WANT TO BE TOTALLY SURPRISED BY THIS BOOK

“Ill Will” juggles various points of view, tenses, and time periods. It does seem like the reader will be playing whack-a-mole sometimes to get back to a character’s storyline.

The basic story at the beginning is that Dustin is a 41-year-old psychologist in Cleveland. He has a loving and supportive wife, Jill, and two teenage sons, Dennis and Aaron, with whom he gets along. He is motivated to help people because of his own background. When he was thirteen, his father, mother, aunt, and uncle were murdered, and he and his two older cousins, Kate and Wave, were sent to live with a grandmother. His adopted older brother Rusty was accused of the crime and found guilty. Rusty is a guest of a government hotel. Dustin was smart and managed to make something of himself despite his traumatic background. It is pure evil genius that Chaon starts from this premise.

THEN Dustin acquires a new patient, Aqil, who says he was a cop but now isn’t. Aqil immediately goes off on a pet theory he has. Young men have been drowning around Ohio. It usually is assumed they were drunk and drowned accidentally in various bodies of water. But Aqil says they were murdered by a fiend he calls “Jack Daniels.” He is now privately investigating the deaths, and he wants Dustin to help him.

THEN Rusty is released from prison when the Innocence Project shows he was innocent of murdering his family. Rusty was partly found guilty based on Dustin’s testimony about Rusty’s Satanic rituals, bullying, threats of killing their parents and burning their house down, and (look away) killing baby bunnies.

THEN Dustin’s wife’s health disintegrates, but she doesn’t want her sons to know she is dying. Meanwhile each of the sons has taken to drugs and prevarication.

Dustin becomes more and more detached as he tries to juggle secrets and deal with the stress of a dying wife, a brother who may want revenge, and a practice that seems to have been taken over Aqil and his “evidence.”

Slowly Chaon reveals the mutable story of when Dustin’s parents died. Dustin’s parents and his cousins’ parents are siblings married to siblings, just one of Chaon’s weird and wonderful dangling details. The two families are scheduled to go on a summer vacation drive to Yellowstone Park. Dustin and his cousins are sleeping in a trailer on the driveway while their parents party in the house. Rusty, who is six years older than Dustin, is off partying with his friends. Then the memories and stories diverge.

Kate and Wave are dangerously bored and Rusty adds hormonal fuel to that teenage fire. Just before the night of the murder Rusty holds a Satanic ritual at the local graveyard. It is the 1980s, a time of heavy metal, Satanic fascination, Goth style. He claims to be able to call up a demon — a minor demon he blithely says. Everyone is blitzed on drugs and alcohol.

The bad things in Dustin’s life don’t start with the graveyard ritual and the murders. The bad things started with Rusty's arrival. Chaon reveals more and more details of Dustin’s family life and the effect Rusty and his cousins had on him. If you have read “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson, you will understand the sense of psychological dread Chaon creates. And he does that well.

Around the middle of the book, Chaon mercifully begins to answer some of the questions he has piled up in his wandering narrative.

Is Dustin a good psychologist, and what are the repercussions of his family tragedy?

As Dustin’s obsession with Aqil’s theory grows, his distance from his sons grows and he becomes more distracted. Is his voice in the book unreliable, or is he the one who will save everyone?

In regard to the night of the parental murders, who is telling the truth? There are certainly as many versions of what happened as there are people who were there.

Is there a demon silently running amok?

Good questions. Good answers. “Ill Will” is tense and foreboding as hell. I gave myself a good head-to-toe shiver after I finished this book.

And for those of you who like quotes to judge the flavor of the writing, here's Chaon on Dennis and Aaron's druggie friend, Rabbit:

He cogitated all the hope out of his life, which of course is the danger.