Review: "Kill Your Darlings," Peter Swanson

Wendy and Thom Graves seem to have it all. They live in a lovely Victorian near the ocean on Boston’s North Shore. Their grown son, Jason, is doing well. They’re financially secure. Thom is a professor in the English department at New Essex State University while Wendy is a published poet.

But they share a dark secret.

Thom murdered Wendy’s first husband, an alcoholic philanderer who also happened to be quite rich. Thom struggles with his guilt. He drinks too much, and has casual affairs.

Wendy keeps an eye on Thom, but chooses to ignore problems. However, when she discovers he may be writing a novel about their past, she decides he too must go.

Kill Your Darlings is a tour de force. It is a delicious novel of suspense with fascinating, well-drawn characters and a story that is told backwards.

Yes. Backwards.

The reader follows Wendy and Thom back in time, as they deal with the mysterious death of Thom’s department chair, have a baby, decide to have a child, and get married. Thom commits murder. Wendy and Thom hatch the murder plot. The two connive to meet each other in Cambridge, Mass., “by accident.”

Wendy and Thom actually do encounter each other by chance at a writers’ conference. They had been teenage sweethearts, when Wendy lived briefly in New Hampshire, Thom’s home state. They connected on a school trip to Washington, DC., where they snuck off to see the “Exorcist stairs.” Let’s just say the place where the film’s Father Damian met his death looms large in both past and present in this novel.

The reader learns that Wendy never told Thom the truth about her own past, once she moved away from New Hampshire. And Thom had kept a special secret of his own for 40 years. It’s a stunner revealed in the final pages.

I didn’t feel much compassion for either character, but I couldn’t dislike Thom, despite his foibles and misdeeds. Wendy, with her dry wit and razor-sharp coolness, was a character to admire, evil as she was. She was just so cool about everything.

Swanson is a master plotter. I also enjoy his books because they are usually (maybe always) set in New England, a turf he is well familiar with. His characters often have cats with interesting names—the Graves live with Samsa. I do appreciate an author whom I can depend on for a good read—and a few sardonic smiles.