Ani Katz

This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com: https://www.scifiandscary.com/a-good-man-review/
I received a copy of the book from the publisher for review consideration

'A Good Man' is a novel that is shocking, gripping and deeply effective but also, I fear, hard to review without spoiling. It's one of those books that you know is going to end badly from page one. A mysterious impending doom hangs over everything that happens, leaving you constantly looking for clues as to what is going to go wrong. It’s horrible, but impossible to look away from.
It tells the story of a successful advertising executive with a happy family life but an unhappy past. He lives with his French wife and their eleven-year-old daughter, their existence described in scenes so convincingly normal that they really add to the overall horror of the book. His mother and sisters play a large part too, living in a large house in the middle of nowhere. They're distressingly eccentric, and the chapters they feature in play out like something from Shirley Jackson's 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'. Despite their oddities they too are convincing, their neuroses painful to witness.
As well as Jackson, the book owes a debt to Gillian Flynn. The central character is deliciously unreliable as a narrator, frequently challenged by others over his recollection of events so that you never really know if what you are reading is real or imagined. This adds to the disturbing quality of the book. It’s disorienting and strangely eerie, like being trapped in someone else’s nightmare.
At just over 200 pages ‘A Good Man’ is refreshingly short and demands to be read as quickly as possible., Despite the fact that many of the scenes are of everyday life, I found that I couldn't put it down. Ani Katz is an excellent writer, and my mention of Flynn and Jackson is meant to highlight her talent rather than to suggest the book is derivative. It stands on its own two feet: bleak, upsetting, chilling and memorable. Highly recommended, but don’t blame me if it leaves you shaken.… (plus d'informations)

Thomas Martin is a successful ad executive with a pretty wife, a daughter he loves, and a nice house on Long Island. Sounds great, right? Well, we know from the outset that it doesn't end well.

The initial setup of the book doesn't leave too much of a mystery: Something tragic happens to Thomas' family--and since it's a first person crime/thriller, you know the narrator can't be completely relied upon. That doesn't seem to be a huge recipe for success, or at the very least seems like it will be a retread, but Ani Katz generally makes it work.

It's a short book, a little over 200 pages, so it moves fairly briskly; I finished it in an evening. Although the general trajectory is predictable, Katz writes it well enough to keep you hooked and make you unsure exactly how and when things will happen. Although you know that Thomas has to be an unreliable narrator, he isn't a consistently unreliable one: you don't know how his self-perception is divorced from reality, and the degree isn't consistent. He seems to have been happily married, a good employee, a loving father, and there's independent evidence of that, such as promotions at work.

And yet, the seeds of toxic masculinity are there--the odd descriptions of the women in his life, referring to his wife and daughter as his "girls", his family history. The brevity of the book means that some aspects are only sketched out or hinted at, and character development was part of the fun for me.

(As a Long Island native I have a soft spot for books set there and particularly enjoyed the unnamed shout-out to the Walt Whitman Mall, where I spent so many hours as a teenager.)… (plus d'informations)