EVERY TOWN HAS ITS SECRETS
In Savage Lane, Jason Starr has crafted a searing tale of suspense that proves the adage: Love thy neighbor, but don’t pull down your hedge. Karen Daily, recently divorced, lives with her two kids in a quaint suburb of New York City. She’s teaching at a nearby elementary school, starting to date again, and for the first time in years has found joy in her life. Mark … life. Mark Berman, Karen’s friend and neighbor, wants out of his unhappy marriage, and so does his wife, Deb, but they have stayed together for the sake of their children.
Unbeknownst to Karen, while Mark’s marriage has deteriorated his obsession with her has grown. And as Mark’s rich fantasy life takes on a more sinister edge, rumors begin to spread about Karen and a bigger secret is uncovered. And soon Karen finds that Mark is not the only one who has taken an undesired interest in her…
Jason Starr is one of our most accomplished writers of the darkness that lies within the human heart, and Savage Lane is his most riveting and intimate novel yet—a dark, domestic thriller and an honest, searing satire of a declining marriage, suburban life, and obsessive love.
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Man, this book is so wrong in all of the right ways.
It is crammed chock full of hideous, self-absorbed people doing awful things, self-righteously justifying their nasty choices while judging others viciously.
It has at least one psychopath, arguably two, who are just Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs and it is so darkly funny and absurd that I found myself laughing out loud several different times.
Bear in mind that this is a psychological thriller.
It was berserk and I loved it.
”JASON STARR’S SAVAGE LANE IS A BEAUTIFUL-UGLY, CHARACTER-RICH AND MULTI-LAYERED EXPLOSION OF MIDDLE CLASS SUBURBAN PARANOIAS…”
I opened the Hitchcock-esque cover of JASON STARR’S book, stylishly produced by NO EXIT PRESS, and found a receipt from the previous person who had had a go at reading it.
It was left in page 25; so deduced they’d had tried and then given up.
The receipt:
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1 Pint of milk
1 Pork Pie
1 copy of the Daily Mail newspaper
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I could forgive them the milk – not the pie (as I’m Vege-ish). And, certainly not the Daily Mail. Although… I was confused that a Daily Mail reader had enough taste to pick it up in the first place. I quickly concluded this book must have been a gift from a more free thinking sibling, relative or had simply fallen in their bag as they shopped. Or, maybe someone slipped it in whilst they were distracted by an exclusive Farage on Clarkson sex exposé calling to them from another shelf?
After thinking on the receipt I knew I was going to get way past where my predecessor had left their mark… and I did. It had me well and truly hooked.
I read it to the end with all the time I could magic-up around my day job, writing myself and that left over by a one year old daughter who seems to think sleep is something she needs to grow into in a year or two.
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SAVAGE LANE is exciting; a soup of relationships, paranoia and seedy complications all building and overlapping – you can feel it going bad – someone’s going down – or all of them are.
‘It felt designed for me to want them to suffer somehow, so I relished it when they did.’ – Bristol Noir
The tension is beautifully played out and built-up… making it un-put-downable, as the situations get more fraught and ugly between all the characters.
This is the one of the first Noir books of this type I’ve read; less the P.I., grift or cliched femme fetale. And, I really loved it; imagining David Lynch type set pieces throughout with white picket fences, a suburban district gone bad and a dark weirdness going on behind behind twitching curtains. The badness flows down Savage Lane… all ready to blow up and out at you as read it. And this is the main theme or aesthetic I really liked and loved; making a simple character play (as did the original Twin Peaks) that can suck the most average of soap addict in then increase it, hitting them with more and more depth unto the glorious subversive end – by which time it’s too late to jump ship and get out.
Beautifully done Jason Starr on Savage Lane. Or, as I nicknamed it when giving my copy to a friend: ‘STALKER-VILLE / CRAZY-FEST’.
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http://WWW.BRISTOLNOIR.CO.UK
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