I am Death

I am Death

Well, that’s certainly ominous!

Fictional police officers can’t move for serial killers, and this particularly unpleasant fellow calls himself Death, taunting the police with messages at each of his crime scenes, being so incredibly thorough that he leaves no clues, witnesses or anything else that he doesn’t intend to leave behind, while also abducting a young boy and torturing him on the side. It’s up to detective Robert Hunter to catch this sick SOB before too many people make a one-way trip to the morgue.

This book unfortunately has several problems with it. First, Robert Hunter himself is a blank canvas, a conduit through which the plot is advanced rather than a character in his own right. The closest he comes to having a personality or character details is that he suffers from insomnia, which is a convenience as the book doesn’t have to stop for him to go to bed more than anything, and showing a caring attitude with some practical advice towards a depressed witness so they can go outside and start to fight their anxiety.

Second is the villain, the unimaginatively named Death. His character is as stock as Hunter, but at least he actually has a character. His character is to be as horrible as is humanly possible. He’s established as an irredeemable monster within the first 30 pages, (and is even referred to as such by other characters) and he only gets worse from there with his abuse of the boy he kidnapped and gruesome murder methods. The grisly detail in which the murders are described is excessive to the point that on a few occasions I started to feel nauseous and had to put the book down to get some air. It could just be me, since I am rather squeamish as far as medical matters go, which the first kill revolves around, but nevertheless, this is definitely not a book I would recommend for the faint of heart. While reading, the thought occurred to me that hopefully author Chris Carter sticks to writing about serial killers – if he ever starts to try out his ideas in real life, we’ll be in big trouble. Come to think of it, a murder mystery author becoming a real life killer using the methods from their books to kill their victims would be a pretty good idea for a story, but I digress.

Third, the book abuses end-of-chapter cliffhangers to the point of annoyance. Numerous chapters, particularly later on, end with characters saying something to the effect of “You’ll want to see this,” “I have some information for you,” or “Holy shit!” You don’t find out what prompted this response for 2 or 3 chapters, and more often than not, the result wasn’t interesting enough to leave it on a cliffhanger before resolving it. For an exaggerated idea, here’s an example:

Chapter 1: I got hungry, so I went to make lunch. There was nothing in the fridge.

Chapter 2: There was no food there because it’s Wednesday and that’s when I do the weekly shop. I reached for a pen and paper to write a shopping list. They weren’t where I left them.

Chapter 3: The pen and paper were slightly to the left of where I thought they were.

And so on. This abuse means that the cliffhangers soon lose all meaning.

Finally, there’s a big twist at the end regarding the killer’s identity and their motives which turns the whole story on its head. However, this is completely unsatisfying because there’s no foreshadowing of the twist, as it relies entirely on information that is completely unknown to the reader until the killer reveals it in an exposition dump during the climax. There isn’t even a hint as to its nature, so there’s nothing to pick up on that might end up being important later, thus denying the reader the opportunity for some speculation or prediction, which is honestly the most fun in these things. The killer is a minor character from early on, which is usually a shocker, but it doesn’t have any impact here, because said character was both completely unremarkable and not a suspect in the case. They weren’t even suspicious in the sense that they were above suspicion, therefore they must be involved somehow.

Worse, the nature of the twist means we’re asked to sympathise with the killer in the final 20 pages, after they’ve spent the previous 380 pages doing unspeakable things because they have an excuse for why they turned out the way they did. Even as the killer dies (there was no way they were taking this perp in alive), it’s a win for the killer because they die on their terms, having proven their point against the police and won their game. Just to add insult to injury, Hunter and his colleagues don’t celebrate the fact they’ve made the streets safe again, for about 12 seconds before some other nutjob with a God complex crawls out of the woodwork, instead they bemoan his passing. To this I say no! None of that! Shame on you. The killer had long crossed the line of human decency before the book had even started, you don’t get to come back from that and have their death treated as redemption while the police say “Alas poor villain.”

He is Death, but I am Jack’s growing disdain.