Peter Swanson is a shifty guy. Readers familiar with any of his previous eleven novels (and one novella), know that Swanson spins his already twisted, tangled characters like clothes in a demented dryer. The deceitful men and women who inhabit his realm of betrayal and sexual intrigue, inflict all manner of pain on both themselves and each other.
In his previous book, A Talent for Murder, Swanson shifted from tense to tense โ the grammatical and psychological kind โ as the story unfolded with his unique gift for murder, mayhem and madness.
His latest, Kill Your Darlings, plays with formatting, too. It begins at the end, in 2023. We meet Thom and Wendy Graves, an unhappy married couple who just happen to have a secret from their shared past. Itโs a very troubling secret, one whose details, are murky, but it involves something that needs to be held between the two.
Within just a few pages, Wendy has dispatched Thom head over heels down a public staircase in Georgetown made famous for its setting in the film, The Exorcist. Thom is dead.
As they arrive in D.C. on the train, for an allegedly nostalgic getaway, Wendy icily reflects on her soon to be (hopefully) dead husband. โIf Thom were dying of cancer and had only months to live, then bringing him down here for one last hurrah would be seen as something kind, as life-affirming. And Thom did have a cancer rotting him. A lifetime of guilt and shame had metastasized into something uncontrollable.โ
Swanson then begins his backward chronology, and the scene shifts to 2018. At dinner with friends, an especially dull couple, the Hollys, Wendy and Thom are discussing plans for their upcoming joint 50th birthday party. One of the guests asks if they are interested in astrology, given their shared birthdate. โThom and I are living proof that itโs all bullshit. Weโre astrology twins and totally different,โ declares Wendy. Well, that proves to be quite an understatement. Yet the secret they share binds then together in a seemingly inextricable way.
But Wendy, after years of being married to Thom, an English professor, is fed up with his drinking, his womanizing and most importantly, his recent, drunken idea about writing a book, one with a murder in it. Wendy reads the first forty pages of his manuscript and is aghast. โIt was worse that sheโd thought it would be. It was a confession badly disguised as fiction.โ
Swanson relishes including numerous literary and cultural references in his books. Already, within these early pages, besides The Exorcist, heโs name-checked the films Double Indemnity and Body Heat and Stephen Kingโs private detective, Holly.
As the story moves forward, I mean, backward, in an especially devious touch, heโs given Thom and Wendy the last name of Graves, perhaps because the English classical scholar and novelist Robert Graves wrote a famous work about the Roman Empire, I, Claudius. In it, the first Emperor of Rome, Agustus, was married to Livia, a woman who set the bar for malevolence in marriage. (Weโre not forgetting you, Lady MacBeth, but youโre not in this go-round.)
After the big 50th birthday bash, as Wendy sleeps, Thom ponders his life. โDying at fifty was a perfectly reasonable age to die if you looked at the entire history of humans. Still, despite the lucky life heโd led, suddenly it looked tiny to him. Like his whole life experience added up to one of those nothing-much-happens New Yorker stories. Something by Ann Beattie, maybe.โ
The years go by, or do they? Next stop on this carousel of death is 2013. That year (we begin in November) brings our sordid couple the news of the drowning death of Thomโs loathsome department chair, a Professor Deighton. (Yup.) Surely neither Thom nor Wendy has any possible involvement in the tragedy. But in July, when the actual mishap occurred, it seems Wendy had a swim with Deighton, who may have had a bit of dirt he held over her head…
As the years regress, Swanson, a masterful puppet master if ever there was one, fleshes out the lives of the Graves โ the birth of Jason, their only child, Thomโs sexual indiscretions, Wendyโs desire to be a poet, and the gradual accretion of their dishonesty, both to themselves and the people around them.
In 2012, a private investigator speaks to them about the (coincidental?) drowning death of Wendyโs first, uber-wealthy husband.
After a period of living separate lives, in 1993 they meet unexpectedly in New York at a book festival, as Martin Amis is interviewed about his latest book, Timeโs Arrow.
Itโs not easy being Thom and Wendy, even if they bring their problems on themselves. Their โcreation storyโ stretches back to junior high and 1982, the end of the novel, and an exceptional final twist.
Swanson always laces his novels with humor. Wendy, who in 2003 published a poetry collection, Specifics Omitted, even winning a contest. The judge, who shares the name of a notorious 17th century swindler who inspired verse, โElizabeth Grieve,โ pens a laughably pretentious, analysis of Wendyโs work:
โSpecifics Omitted is a remarkable book of poems by a young writer called Wendy Eastman. She is a neo-formalist who uses convention to peel away at layers of understanding. Her lines โ usually iambic tetrameter โ and her rhymes โ often slyly slant โ take mundane objects and make them glow like bioluminescence across a nighttime ocean-scape. To quote from โAt the Sculpture Parkโ: โThere is a wagered immortality at work/ that seems to say: We must not be outshone by trees.โ The title poem, coming as it does at the end of the book, posits a world shed of identifiers, and in so doing refutes its own thesis.โ
In a recent email, Swanson reflected on the experience of writing Kill Your Darlings. โIt was enormously hard. I didn’t outline it exactly, but I did know what happened when they were young (or most of what happened) but then I wrote it in the order in which you read it. Every time I came to a new section I would have to rethink my characters. Where are they at? What is the world like around them? How is their relationship at this point in time? It was a fascinating way to work, but probably one I won’t attempt again.โย
Asked about all the various familiar names of characters, โAnd, yes, there are many references to writers, like there are in most of my books. There’s not always an intentionality to these, but they are often books I’m thinking about at the time. I just have always liked books that are full of literary references.โ
Kill Your Darlings is a terrific entry in the Swanson canon. He leaves the reader with a โnever saw that comingโ twist at the end, which would really be the beginning, except…you know, itโs all backwards.
Peter Swanson is theย Sunday Timesย andย New York Timesย best selling author of 11 novels, includingย The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger,ย Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year. His books have been translated into over 30 languages, and his stories, poetry, and features have appeared inย Asimovโs Science Fiction,ย The Atlantic Monthly,ย Measure,ย The Guardian,ย The Strand Magazine, andย Yankee Magazine.
A graduate of Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College, he lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with his wife.
