NTE

Ok: this book is both problematic and awesome. It's awesome because it's a thriller that manages to keep things tense throughout the whole book - there isn't some promised pat-ending coming, or maybe there is, but at least you can't figure it out from page one. It's not a whodunit: you are given that information from the get go, but more of a "holy shit: are they going to be able to stop this guy?" And it's pretty clear that there's a good chance they won't. What's problematic for me is also one of the things that makes this book so readable and interesting - the portrayal of the main villain. He's a character (spoilers, of course) who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personalities), an actual, real-life people can have this, mental illness. And that's an issue because crazy doesn't equal killer, and mentally ill doesn't equal crazy, and all of the stereotypes that must go along with a diagnosis of DID, and how this perpetuates some of those myths. SO that part squicks me out - I know it's a real issue in our society and how mentally ill people show up in popular culture, and I don't like that. On the other hand, it was a fascinating character, and I don't have DID, so I can't know if the portrayal was accurate - in terms of everything else besides his homicidal tendencies - and if they are, then that's awesome. If they got everything right, except the part that makes people feel like if you have DID you might kill them, is that good enough? I don't know; can't say. I can only say that I enjoyed the book, while being aware that it had some specific troublesome issues. I think that's the best I can do: I've read (and either enjoyed or hated) many questionable books - it definitely got me thinking about if there were any accurate and non-scary characters with mental illnesses (and specifically DID) that I could recall. I've got a couple of PTSD examples, some books with main characters who have anxiety or depression or panic attacks, and even one book that I remember that seemed pretty accurate as far as OCD, but, for the most part, still, in the stuff I'm reading mentally ill = crazy = killer. Which is too damn bad.