book #9

When I pulled down Barbara Rogan's Suspicion (1999) the other day I couldn't at first understand why I hadn't read it before -- it's a book that's been on my shelves for several years. Four lines into it, I remembered.

"Maggie was right about you," Emma Roth says, breaking a silence that has gone on for too long. She gazes through the windshield at the flat gray ribbon of road that unfurls before her. The city is at her back. Ahead lays territory uncharted on her internal map . . .

And that's about where I stopped on earlier forays, because the lays/lies illiteracy is one of my (many) pet peeves. Further, while I've nothing in particular against stories being told in the present tense -- I've done it myself on a few occasions, after all, although not at novel length -- I do dread its use by incompetent, pretentious practitioners (we all recall Patricia Cornwell's ventures along this path), and the appearance of a lays/lies howler in Line 4 is no reassurance that this particular practitioner is anything other.

On this occasion, though, I persevered. The illiteracy in question does indeed turn up a few more times (late in the book, I found myself letting out a little cheer because Rogan finally gets one right), and the anticipated flounderings among the knotty brambles of the pluperfect turn up too. And there are other horrors ("Yolanda laughs, and it's like music pouring out of a player piano" -- perhaps she rolls about the floor?), their effect compounded by a passage somewhere in the middle where Rogan -- speaking through her central character, Emma -- is somewhat snooty about that ghastly genre-writing stuff, then describes what she's just been doing as "textural analysis".

Despite all of that, I found myself romping through Suspicion -- in fact, last night I discovered I was, for the first time in a long while, juggling to cook the supper while simultaneously reading a book, and I'll be keeping at least a desultory eye open for Rogan's other novels.

One of the aspects that make Suspicion interesting is that, while it's a story with a ghost, it's not actually a ghost story. This isn't to say that the ghost has been just slung into the mix on whim; au contraire, it has a significant supporting role. Yet the ghost, or the existence of the ghost, does not drive the plot; what does that is a purely human malice.

Emma is herself a successful ghost-story writer. With husband Roger and son Zack, she moves from Manhattan to a Long Island village, where they've bought a reputedly haunted house. Sure nuff, and despite their rationalist resistance to the notion, they find it is haunted. But there are things going on that seem disconnected from any activity of the ghost's: nasty messages start appearing amid the dialogue of the computer game with which Emma habitually starts her working day, she gets a spurious e-mail or two, a passage of her novel-in-progress suffers vindictive tampering, and so forth. Could all this be connected to a years-old traffic accident in which she was involved, which she survived while others died? Could the never-met widow of the dead man be moving in, vengeance in her heart, ready for the kill?

I spotted the solution pretty early on (possibly because I'm British: in the flimflammery Rogan quite skilfully deploys to hide what's going on, there's a preconception involved that many Americans have and that Brits generally don't), but this in no way stopped me from enjoying what's an excellent psychological thriller -- or "literary thriller", as I'm sure it's been extensively described elsewhere. (I was amused by, but in no sense offput by, the way in which, late in the book when we necessarily shift for twenty or thirty pages from "psychological thriller" to "action" mode, the writing style correspondingly shifts to the kind of genre voice that was disparaged earlier on.) All in all, an experience for which it was well worth overcoming my prejudice.