Sunday, May 28, 2017

"The Only Child"

Andrew Pyper is the author of eight novels, including The Only Child and The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers award for Best Hardcover Novel and was selected for the Globe and Mail’s Best 100 Books of 2013 and Amazon’s 20 Best Books of 2013. Among his previous books, Lost Girls won the Arthur Ellis Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Killing Circle was a New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year. Three of Pyper’s novels, including The Demonologist and The Damned, are in active development for feature film.

Pyper applied the Page 69 Test to The Only Child and reported the following:
The Only Child tells the story of Dr. Lily Dominick, a forensic psychiatrist who is confronted by a particularly disturbing client. Not disturbing only for the terrible crime he's been accused of committing (they've all been accused of terrible crimes) but two impossible claims he makes: first, that he's over two hundred years old and personally inspired the three gothic novels that define the idea of the monster in the Western imagination, and second, he's her father.

Not that she believes any of this. It's the possibility that he knows something about her mother - a woman who died violently and mysteriously when she was only six - that compels her to go in search of this client after he escapes from the hospital.

On page 69, we find Lily breaking with her structured, rational, disciplined life and boarding a plane to Hungary, the "birthplace" of the "monster." Her reading material for the flight? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of the three novels the client says he was the inspiration for. It marks an important step not only on Lily's physical journey into the Old World (and the realm of the uncanny) but, by reading this universally influential fiction, her psychological submergence into the gothic mindscape.
Visit Andrew Pyper's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Only Child.

--Marshal Zeringue