The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Still Missing by Chevy Stevens
Details: Copyright 2010, St Martin's Press
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "On the day she was abducted, Annie O'Sullivan, a thirty-two-year-old realtor, had three goals— sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever-patient boyfriend. The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she's about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all.
Interwoven with the story of the year Annie spent captive in a remote mountain cabin— which unfolds through sessions with her psychiatrist— is the second narrative recounting the nightmare that follows her escape: her struggle to piece her shattered life back together, the ongoing police investigation into the identity of her captor, and the disturbing sense that things are far from over..."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've read Chevy Stevens's work before in the early years of this challenge and wasn't impressed as it had all the things I hate about crime fiction (stock characters, implausible situations), but this was such an interesting premise and was a national bestseller blurbed by an author I like, Gillian Flynn, I decided to give it a shot, knowing that first-time books can often be very different from the author's later work.
How I Liked It:
"A movie doesn't have to be good to be good."
That's a seemingly nonsensical phrase, but you get the meaning right away, don't you? A movie (or TV show, or book) doesn't have to be critically acclaimed, well-made, nor artistically or culturally important to be entertaining.
So what does that say about this book? I'll get there.
First, meet Annie O'Sullivan. This book opens as she starts sessions with her new therapist (that's the framing device), and concerns two stories: her kidnapping and being held and brutalized in captivity for a year, and her current life in the aftermath.
Pre-kidnapping, Annie is a somewhat successful realtor with a restaurateur boyfriend, a good friend/fellow-realtor she's known since high school, a faithful golden retriever, and an unhappy relationship with her occasionally overbearing, selfish mother, which is made more complex by the fact that as a child, she lost her father and teenage sister in a car accident, and her only other family is her mother's sister (and her family) with whom her mother engages in a tense, constant rivalry.
Annie is abducted by a friendly, unremarkable man she encounters at an Open House who gets her alone and forces her into his van at gunpoint. He then drugs her and takes her to a remote cabin in the mountains, where he subjects her to rape, beatings, and other abuse.
Annie in the present is free physically from her captor, but in horrible shape. She sleeps in her closet with her dog for a guard, and avoids friends and family as much as she can, including her boyfriend. She is plagued by traumatic memories as well as constant reporters and struggles to adjust to life outside of her captivity (for one thing, her captor had her on a strict body elimination schedule with a pretty disgusting punishment if she didn't comply), wondering how she ever cared about things like fashion and holidays.
Things heat up with the investigation into her captor and it's revealed he wasn't just a lone weirdo, he had ties to someone close to her and they aren't done with her yet. The plot is revealed as well as some long-held secrets and Annie must face a number of facts, including that her life pre-kidnapping was pretty fraught with issues. A conclusion is reached and if it's a bit abrupt, it's at least somewhat optimistic.
It's hard not to compare this story to Dark Places not only because Gillian Flynn blurbed the cover and the shadow of how well-done that thriller was hangs over all over thrillers I'm reading this year, but because the stories have some similarities.
Both Annie O'Sullivan and Libby Day are adult women who have reached a crossroads at their lives about the trauma that has happened to them, both are in danger that must lead them to a conclusion, and most notably to me, both are misanthropes struggling thanks to their trauma.
While Flynn's writing can walk the careful line that is the ridiculous, tabloid culture of crime and sound plausible, Stevens... can't quite. Annie too frequently sounds at times like an almost PG-13 version of Libby Day, referring to her captor as "the Freak", and quick with a dismissive "pipsqueak" for irksome people, although she gamely peppers swears at other opportunities, seemingly not sure how they're supposed to be used.
Annie also crassly reflects she's glad at least her captor isn't "kinky" and into blowjobs or anal sex (no, seriously).
And I realize this last bit is a matter of personal taste, but Annie reflects on herself repeatedly as "the girl who..." (ex: "I wanted to be the girl who liked candy" "I should be the girl picking out apples with him" "I'm not just the girl who went missing, now I'm the girl who..."). She's established as in her thirties. What exactly is stopping her from considering herself the woman who [fill in the blank]? I'm aware people also do this in real life, but it's grating all the same.
Her captor is clearly a mix of several popular archetypes (and famous cases like him), and we also learn some of his backstory, at least that he's constructed in his head to tell Annie, and it's a mishmash of loss of traditional values, fear of the government, and child abuse and abandonment (and his fascination with and hatred of women comes from being abused by one). There's a hint that he might be the sort to have a manifesto, but he's not quite finessed enough. Which is fine, as such jumbles of motive and logic and politics happen all the time in real life cases. But the villain seems like he would've benefited from at least a slightly more structured bastardery or at least more development about his character.
The characters around Annie also occupy a certain odd sense of cartoonish insensitivity not unique to this novel. Do people in real life say insensitive things to trauma victims? Of course they do. But that's tricky to translate into fiction and clunkier attempts just come across as ridiculous and implausible and take one right out of the story.
A few years ago, I reread a childhood favorite, the YA classic The Face on the Milk Carton about a teenage girl that discovers she's a missing child. There were follow-up books due to the first book's popularity and without spoilers, it's safe to say it's an extreme adjustment for the main character. And if the author fumbled a bit with how memory operates in the first book, any emotional intelligence into human relationships fairly well exits abruptly in the latter books, since characters are shown sympathetically having cartoonishly evil responses to a trauma victim (calling her "selfish" for struggling to adjust, even referring to her as a "kidnappette").
Again, can otherwise sympathetic people have cartoonishly selfish responses to a trauma victim in real life? Can they mess up and be insensitive, even cruel? Of course! But again, this is fiction and when you have one character compare (on a "things are hard" level) an unhappy marriage and a messy divorce to her friend's year of being raped and beaten and held against her will and the text goes along with it as do all the characters, as this book does, you've started to stretch credibility.
As the plot twist is revealed, the book starts to border on camp territory. Absolutely ridiculously cartoonish actions and responses (which again, absolutely do happen in real life cases, but, well, that's also pretty tricky to get across in fiction) as well as some truly unethical and awful behavior by sympathetic characters pretty much handwaved off, bring the book to its more staid, fairly abrupt close, with a truly optimistic future for Annie, perhaps for the first time in her life.
The book has a lot of shortcomings. Some of them even glaringly, unintentionally hilariously so. And yet I found myself captivated and more or less on the edge of my seat. There's genuine heart and feeling at times, and some scenes (and not even the more louder, action-packed ones) are genuinely heartbreaking, and I couldn't say any of that about the previous book of Stevens's that I'd read.
So while the book may never dazzle with its realism, its villains don't stagger with their complexity, and there's more than a few laughs where there absolutely shouldn't be, given the subject matter, the book is still a consuming, highly entertaining read, so long as you adjust some expectations accordingly.
A book doesn't need to be good to be good.
Final Grade: B
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