Pike

3 out of 5

By Kyle Massey on Sep 21, 2016

First off, I don't know how we know Pike's first name is Douglas, because it doesn't say that anywhere in the book, but okay. The synopsis is perhaps understating it by saying Pike is "relentlessly visceral." You finish the book and feel like you just woke up from a nightmare to find yourself hungover and beat-up. Whitmer doesn't skimp on the taboos, managing to work in graphic violence, drug use, squalid poverty, prostitution, necrophilia, incest, child abuse, and animal cruelty at various points. The Kentucky mountains and inner-city Cincinnati are depicted with equal brutality: the former with its biker bars and vicious amateur boxing, and the latter with the promised "junkie squats and homeless camps." So if, like me, you like it raw (or burned black), this is a landscape where no one will hear you scream. But I only gave it three stars because ... something was missing. I couldn't connect to any of the characters. Pike is supposed to be sort of a reluctant antihero, but something feels off. He was a monster to his ex-wife and daughter, and then ran off and led a life of crime before returning to the Kentucky coal town he hates and which doesn't like him much either, and now he's suddenly on this quest to find out what caused the death of the daughter he abandoned if only to find somebody else to blame besides himself. Hard to feel sympathy for him, not that he asks for any. And then there's this rogue cop, Derrick, a pimp and a pusher and a brute, but a one-man goon squad on child molesters--real or imagined. And there's Wendy, the granddaughter unceremoniously dumped in Pike's lap by one of her dead mother's nasty hooker friends. Growing up amid such chaos, yet she's supersmart--at one point we see her reading the complete stories of Poe. She conveniently acquired her love of reading--her only real personality trait besides reflexive hostility--from the kindly old lady next door in their blighted Cincy neighborhood. But you know, Whitmer is a Writer with a capital W, so he has to find a place to show off his book smarts. Same reason he has Pike and Rory going around quoting Hemingway to each other. I hate when self-conscious Writers have their characters make literary allusions that seem miles out of their wheelhouse. It just doesn't work most of the time. In the end, Pike’s whole quest for answers seems like a fool’s errand, but a bunch of people get killed along the way before he and Wendy hightail it to Mexico, leaving me with a big question mark.