Before beginning his exceptionally unnerving new book, go ahead and lock the door, but it won’t help. You’ll still be stuck inside yourself, which for Chaon is the most precarious place to be ... Chaon, who lost his own wife — the writer Sheila Schwartz — in 2008, captures the obscuring effects of grief with extraordinary tenderness. But he sows that misery in the soil of a literary thriller that germinates more terror than sorrow. There’s something irresistibly creepy about this story that stems from the thrill of venturing into illicit places of the mind ... Chaon’s great skill is his ability to re-create that compulsive sense we have in nightmares that we’re just about to figure everything out — if only we tried a little harder, moved a little faster ... Chaon’s novel walks along a garrote stretched taut between Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. By the time we realize what’s happening, we’ve gone too far to turn back. We can only inch forward into the darkness, bracing for what might come next.
Following writers like Richard Matheson and Shirley Jackson,Dan Chaon writes in the spooky tradition of suburban gothic. His outstanding Ill Will hinges on unsolved murders over two time periods ... Central to Ill Will is its case study of delusion. Mr. Chaon connects the murder of Dustin’s parents to the satanic-ritual abuse hysteria of the 1980s, in which children were induced to testify to events that never happened ... An unreliable narrator can often feel like a cheap trick in the novelist’s playbook, but Mr. Chaon employs it masterfully, integrating unreliability into the book’s very typography ... the power of “Ill Will” is in its atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. Its eerily persuasive idea that we can’t trust our own minds left me with a shiver of.
With some of its twists and turns, Ill Will even seems to have anticipated our current world of fake news and 'alternative facts' ... The novel also taps into the toxic legacies of American class divisions. Dustin’s late wife, a lawyer, believed his 'white trash' background had consequences for him that went even deeper than he realized ... A few of Chaon’s tactics — his occasional use of double or triple columns of narrative, and his odd word spacing, both within paragraphs and vertically on the page — don’t always work. His knack for leaving sentences tellingly unfinished and thoughts menacingly incomplete, however, is perfect. If you’re up for being caught in a seamy heartland underbelly of fear, superstition, and paranoia, with side excursions through urban legend and recovered-memory hysteria, Ill Will is your book. But it may not be for everyone.
In his haunting, strikingly original new novel, Ill Will, Chaon takes formidable risks, dismantling his timeline like a film editor and building the narrative with short, urgent chapters told from a few key perspectives. Intentionally fragmented, the structure echoes the illusive patterns of memory, how life-changing events return to us over long periods of time in vivid scraps and can be tweaked or embellished depending on where our lives are when we remember them ... Chaon brilliantly conveys Dustin’s childhood shame and the subtle ways it survives in the damaged adult he becomes ... I read the concluding sections with increasing horror; the ending, twisting in the author’s assured hands like a Rubik’s Cube, is at once predictable and harrowing. Somehow, it resolved nothing and left me shaken.
...[an] offbeat, powerfully unsettling murder mystery ... The deeper you get into the free-streaming narratives of Ill Will, which moves back and forth in time, changing points of view, the hazier they become. Painting the past with what one character calls a 'swimmy quality,' Ill Will undercuts the reliability and usefulness of memories ... the writerly stagecraft keeps the reader off guard and sometimes on edge, in a kind of altered cognitive state. There's a lot going on under the surface of Ill Will — more than one reading will reveal. Going back and reading this oddly compelling book again will only provide more pleasure.
Reading a truly terrifying novel can make you feel like you’re drowning ... As Chaon moves nimbly between viewpoints, calling memories and relationships into question, a powerful undercurrent of dread begins to form beneath the story, slowly but inexorably pulling you under.
Ill Will [is] the most disturbing novel I’ve ever read ... Mr. Chaon makes you question what parts of that mental chaos is factual and what isn’t as he intertwines the past with present, giving different perspectives from different characters, some in first person narration and some in third. Even the layout of the text gives segments a very disjointed vibe as he fills pages with double columned narrations, email correspondence and text message snippets. It can be very gimmicky at times, but it gives the reader a very shaky ground to stand on, which is exactly how Mr. Chaon wants it ... Anything seedy, sexual, and satanic you can think of, Mr. Chaon manages to conjure it up through the course of the novel. He doesn’t take his foot off your throat until the very end. Reading Ill Will will make you question Mr. Chaon’s intentions with the book title. Although Ill Will puts you through the unsavory ringer, there is no questioning Mr. Chaon’s writing chops.
...disturbing, amazing, masterful ... While Dustin trolls his past for truth and, a more sinister storyline emerges. Chaon fans who have read his previous novels will be pleased to know that, as is his wont, the author waits until the uncanniest moment to loop characters and plots together, providing a frightening finish. Nothing is resolved and not everything is explained, but that matters very little.
...it quickly becomes clear to the reader just how oblivious Dustin is in buying into his own self-satisfying nostrums—so much so that the suspense of Ill Will seeps out a bit earlier than it might in a purer crime page-turner. Yet Chaon manages to maintain interest in Dustin with a handful of plots that rotate like the whirling lines in a hypnotist's pinwheel around a receding center ... What's sinisterly good about Ill Will is Chaon's audacity in teasing out the strands of his novel, enlisting vastly different yet somehow linked perspectives on a series of seemingly ritualized killings, separated by decades, as if they come from the far sides of a single unfinished jigsaw puzzle ... an especially bedeviling yet strangely despairing experience.
...[a] captivating narrative ... Narratively speaking, Chaon goes for the fences, telling this intricate story in a rotating series of voices, perspectives and forms ... At times, the prose on the page takes unusual arrangements — columns, squares, words tumbling into white space. These visual arrangements generate a disoriented yet layered read, particularly when the reader is spending time with Aaron in his drug-addled condition. This intended effect is certainly accomplished, but often these bold choices break the spell of the reading experience. Ultimately, the brilliance of Chaon’s writing comes through in his agile ability to depict the acute states of isolation and alienation of his characters.
