Ill will

In Ill Will, four members of a family are murdered one night in 1983 while their children sleep outside in a camper. An adopted child of the family is convicted of the murder and sent to prison and the other children grow up either coming to grips with the horrific event...or not.

Ill Will focuses on Dustin, the youngest of the group of children, cousins, who are left behind. He has grown up to become a psychotherapist who wrote a doctoral dissertation on recovered memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse. He has married a high powered lawyer named Jill and they have two sons. You quickly realize that Dustin is a bad therapist for many reasons. He allows his patients to cross professional boundaries, he accepts questionable stories without much resistance, and he deceives himself that he is in control of the situations he finds himself in.

When the story begins, Dustin finds out that Rusty, his adopted older brother, who had been sent to prison for the murder of their father and mother, aunt and uncle, has just been released after being exonerated of the crime by DNA testing. He also finds out that Jill, his wife, has cancer. Dustin's life descends into a kind of chaos that you feel he'd have the power to calm if he would wake up and stop lying to himself, or tell someone else the whole truth about.

This book is highly readable. It is psychologically creepy. Also, like certain horror movies, it has characters who don't listen as you tell them not to go to that abandoned former funeral home in the middle of the night, with similar results. It has some stylistic quirks. One quirk, leaving blank spaces in a line of text to indicate gaps in Dustin's thought, is pretty effective. Another quirk, where several narratives are printed in columns on the same page, is less so. I thought the ending was satisfying in that it solved the main original questions, but also left quite a bit open to speculation.