Kill Your Darling by Clay McLeod Chapman
Bad Hand Books (September 2024)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin
It took thirty-eight laps around Billy’s skull to empty the roll of duct tape. They drew two lopsided and unblinking black ovals over his eyes.
Twenty years later, Glenn’s dogged mind runs on a constant loop — Billy kissing a girl at the dance, that squeal of peeling tape, his grim imaginings of his son’s final moments, where his soul may lie, and silvery ghosts. How can he and his wife, Carol, move on with every suspect’s fabric of guilt pulled at like a loose thread and then discarded? Without a conviction? A who or why?
Glenn won’t give up. He calls the police religiously, cycling through generations of deputies, detectives, and sheriffs, each less concerned with Billy’s murder than the last. This was an especially nice touch from Clay McLeod Chapman. He crafts one-way avenues and dead ends of hope in Kill Your Darling. The dread is inescapable.
But Carol isn’t quite ready to give up. Her and Glenn’s marriage, after the death of their son, becomes an agreement to grieve together and maintain one another. So, she signs her dissociative husband up for a creating writing course, hoping expression will offer relief.
Tell the story you’re dying to tell!
Chapman explores a playful narrative structure in Glenn’s creative writing courses. He employs familiar phrases like “write what you know” or “you must grab your reader’s attention from the first sentence” to remind readers he knows the rules and tackles them with lyrical, haunting prose. He pins his audience against the wall, trapped like flies to adhesive tape, from the get-go. I love the opening chapter’s final line: “How’s that for a hook?”
In shock, I muttered, “Holy f*ck,” after reading it.
Glenn is determined to tell his son’s story, The Book of Billy, and soon finds himself sinking into the depths of his grief. Everything has to be just so until it can no longer be. But how far is too far in the name of healing?
Believe me, Chapman will show you.
As the author did in his novels What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters, he evokes such emotion from readers, with his raw exploration of pain and trauma. There are ghosts everywhere. The meaning is clear. Pain is horrific. It feeds. And it’s all-consuming.
If you want a book that will make you weep, something tragic, unsettling, and filled with ghosts, it’s Kill Your Darling.
Fans of Hereditary will eat this up.
