“Sometimes at night, he’s out there.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JUL 7, 2011)

There’s one thing you can count on with author Megan Abbott, you can never predict which direction her novels will take you. Abbott’s first novel, Die a Little is set in 50s Hollywood and is an exploration of the strange relationship between two women. Then came The Song is You, based on the unsolved disappearance of actress Jean Spangler. This novel was followed by Queenpin, the story of a female book keeper who works for a glamorous, hard-as-nails mob-connected woman. Abbott’s next novel, Bury me Deep, set in the 30s, is a fictionalized account of a real-life murder. And that brings me to The End of Everything, a deeply engrossing book in which Abbott explores the relationship between two 13-year-old girls. I don’t care for a child narrator, but there are hints that this tale is told by Lizzie in adulthood years later.

The End of Everything is set in contemporary times in a sleepy Midwestern upscale community, and the tale is narrated by Lizzie Hood–a 13-year-old who is about to graduate from middle school. She lives with her older brother, Ted and her divorced mother in a large house right next door to her inseparable friend, Evie Verver. Lizzie’s mother is having an affair with a local married doctor, and he sneaks into the house at night for furtive trysts. Since things are not always so hot at Lizzie’s house, it makes a lot of sense for Lizzie to spend a great deal of time at Evie’s house. Evie’s home seems to be the perfect, safe haven for the two girls to hang out together. While Evie’s mother is in the shadowy background, focused on domestic tasks, Evie’s father is kind, concerned and very involved in the lives of his two daughters: Evie and her “deeply glamorous” older sister, 17-year-old Dusty:

“A movie star, in halter tops and eyelet and clacking Dr. Scholl’s. Eyelashes like gold foil and eyes the colour of watermelon rind and a soft, curvy body. Always shiny-lipped and bright white-teethed, lip smack, flash of tongue, lashes bristling, color high and surging up her cheeks.”

The summer begins just “like a million other girl summers.” But then the unthinkable happens…one day Evie disappears. There are no clues to her whereabouts, and Lizzie was one of the last people to see her. Then Lizzie remembers seeing a maroon sedan slowly coasting back and forth right before Evie disappeared….

Megan Abbott captures not only the voice of a vulnerable 13-year-old girl, but she also captures the grief, the desperation, and also the paranoia that surrounds Evie’s disappearance. In Evie’s absence, Lizzie is increasingly drawn to the Verver household. She feels the need to fill the void left by Evie. Being in Evie’s home and even wearing her clothes somehow makes Lizzie feel less helpless, but since this is a Megan Abbott novel, there are darker forces at play. Lizzie becomes the central figure in the maelstrom surrounding Evie’s disappearance. While Lizzie’s classmates speculate about what is happening to Evie and luxuriate in the lurid imagined details, Lizzie is drawn deeper and deeper into the secrets behind Evie’s disappearance.

The End of Everything, an impressive change of pace for Abbott, has the macabre feel of a Grimm’s fairy tale, and this is achieved partly through the author’s playful use of language and through the references to the Verver girls as “princesses.” This riveting story builds a safe world and then dismantles it, brick by brick while exploring the loss of innocence. The disappearance of a 13- year-old-girl is terrifying, but there’s another secret predatory terror here that lurks in the corner just off the page and slightly out-of-focus. Abbott strips away the safety net of family and gives us a dark glimpse of what festers underneath:

“These are all the good things, and there were such good things. But then there were the other things, and they seemed to come later, but what if they didn’t? What if everything was there all along, creeping soundlessly from corner to corner, shuddering fast from Evie’s nighttime whispers, from the dark hollows of that sunny-shingled house, and I didn’t hear it? Didn’t see it?”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (July 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Megan Abbott and new blog
EXTRAS:	Excerpt MF Interview with Megan Abbott
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Bury Me Deep Queenpin The Song is You

Bibliography:

• Die a Little (2005)
• The Song is You (2007)
• Queenpin (2007) 
• Bury Me Deep (2009)
• The End of Everything (2011)
• Dare Me (July 2012)

“There were places too murky ever to see through. The bloody fury of the night and everything storming up to it, none of it was ever going to lie flat and let her run knowing fingers across it and see all the patterns and shapes and meanings for what they were. There was no essence to them. It was all mayhem and blood and now preening sorrow” — BURY ME DEEP

Click here for interview with MEGAN ABBOTT

Gorgeous starlets who vanish from the elusive glitter of Hollywood, dingy dives that cater to the decadent, deviant tastes of the terminally depraved, and repressed housewives who clean by day and party by night–these are the sort of women who inhabit the novels of Megan Abbott, one of the most exciting names in today’s world of crime fiction. The Czar of Noir, author and film critic Eddie Muller gave Megan Abbott a tagline: Queenpin, and it’s a fitting name. Not only is it the title of Abbott’s third novel but it also refers to the idea that Abbott reigns in the world of noir. Males have long dominated this genre; consider the triptych of noir: Hammett, Chandler and Cain, and what of the creations of noir fiction? Immortalized in our minds are detectives Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. But where does that leave women in noir?

In noir fiction, the archetypal femme fatale emerges as the dominant female character, and of course the femme fatale is the polar opposite of that other oft-found character: the drab little woman in the kitchen. Megan Abbott’s novels stand apart from the herd because she successfully creates strong female types who transcend the typical noir boundaries. In noir fiction, female sexuality not only leads men astray, but it’s something to be controlled by men in a male-dominated world.

Abbott takes the idea of suppressed and controlled female sexuality and unleashes it through her female-centered novels. While men exist in the pages of Abbott’s novels, and they exist sometimes to control women’s sexuality, the male characters are not the centre of the novels, and each of Abbott’s novels pulse with the unslaked passion of the female protagonists. This is a remarkable feat and no small achievement, especially in The Song is You, the story of starlet Jean Spangler who disappears without trace. The tale of Jean’s disappearance is told through the eyes of a male, but the story remains firmly focused on a woman who isn’t there, and this, of course, recalls Laura–one of the greatest noir tales that also happens to have been written by a woman, Vera Caspary back in 1943.

In Queenpin, Abbott gives us two main female characters. There’s Gloria—a vicious “collector,” feared and respected by the males in her world. She promotes her protégé–an unnamed, ambitious twenty-two-year-old grooming her for the future. But is the future strictly professional? And while Abbott plays with traditional mother-daughter female roles, she cleverly lets other possibilities emerge.

It’s always rewarding to follow a novelist as they become increasingly more popular, and that’s exactly what’s happened with Megan Abbott. I came across my first Megan Abbott novel a few years ago, and incidentally, it wasn’t Megan Abbott’s first novel–it was her second, The Song is You. Even now a few years later, the novel still haunts me, and it was so good I was convinced to back track and pick up an out-of-print copy of Abbott’s first novel, Die a Little. From that point, I had to wait a year or so to get my hands on the third novel Queenpin, and this leads me to Abbott’s fourth novel, Bury Me Deep, based on the life and crimes of Winnie Ruth Judd.

In Bury Me Deep, it’s still a man’s world, and it’s a world inhabited by women who are the temporary playthings of the men who have the money and power to enforce society’s rules. The novel’s main character is Marion, an innocent, naïve and lonely woman whose much older husband finds her a job as a filing clerk in a medical clinic, and leaves her in a rooming house while he slaves away in Mexico, working as a doctor for a mining company. Left to her own devices, Marion is gradually led astray and slowly corrupted by a nurse named Louise. Louise pimps on the side in order to maintain her female lover’s drug habit, and so she feeds Marion to a local satyr, Joe Lanigan. The sexually naïve Marion is vulnerable to Lanigan’s sly courtship, and of course, she completely misunderstands the relationship, trading quick sex and the unchartered territory of female pleasure for vague promises. The book’s dark atmosphere of dread and impending doom is maintained steadily and relentlessly from page one. Even though Marion attends parties and imagines that her drab little life is “improving,” it’s obvious to the reader that the tension and drama can only go in one direction, and as Marion’s life spirals out of control, events take an explosive, irrevocable path.

In some ways, by reconstructing a real-life crime, Megan Abbott has returned to familiar territory in Bury Me Deep, but in this novel she enters the mind of a woman whose fling with sexuality leaves her scarred, damaged, and dangerously cornered by circumstance. Aspects of the crime committed by Winnie Ruth Judd remain a mystery, and Bury Me Deep addresses the mystery by its powerful recreation of the mind of a horribly damaged woman.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (July 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Megan Abbott
EXTRAS:	MF Interview with Megan Abbott
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Queenpin The Song is You

Bibliography:

• Die a Little (F2005)
• The Song is You (2007)
• Queenpin (2007)
• Bury Me Deep (2009)
• The End of Everything (2011)
• Dare Me (2012)
• The Fever (June 2014)