Steve Nye’s quiet life takes an unexpected turn when he receives a call from his mother. His father attacked her and has been committed to an asylum. The doctor says he’s suffering from dementia. But Steve’s father seems so calm, clear-eyed, and lucid when he whispers, “I killed her”. Is it simply symptom of his father’s delusion and madness?

Good points: I loved the story within the story about the woman who loved hands so much she decided to find the hand God and since she couldn’t be satisfied by seeing and touching and being touched, she wanted to die by the hand. Creepy and A+ writing.

People liked to talk about the head or the heart as if they were the most important parts of a man. But it was hands that translated thought into action, that set down the words composed in the poet’s brain, that sculpted or painted the forms imagined in the artist’s mind, that played the music born in the composer’s soul. Hands were the intermediary between the ethereal and the material, the celestial and the base, and nowhere was this truer than in the realm of love. There was a maneuverability in hands that was not found in the penis, an ability to perform multiple movements at once. The penis could only grow soft or hard, could only move in its function as an appendage to the pelvis, but the possibilities of the hand were endless.

I also liked the slow descent into madness and his girlfriend’s desire to murder puppies. If you love puppies, you might find that part a bit yucky.

Bad points: It’s a messy book and I get it, the main character is a bit messy. He starts killing because he can’t stop himself. He doesn’t want to be blackmailed. He loves it. He originally thought how terrible it might have been that his father might have killed his ex wife but now he does it too. It’s not as good as Dexter and his dark passenger is a bit more obscure.

“Went out for a walk.”
“Was it fun?”
Steve thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

Also, if you don’t like clowns, I must warn you there’s a few creepy one in this book. Aaaaand there’s a hand job if I can call it that since it’s just done with “a single finger” on the clown’s “warm and spongy” hardened organ. *puke*

Well, as things go, poor Steve is always the victim so if it wasn’t for his father potentially killing two people when he was younger and his mother taking him to the circus, he might not be where he is today, but then again, isn’t the experiences in our younger years the one that form us?

The ending of the book is insanely bloody (5* for that – with Steve using a machete to kill the pervy clown, his neighbour, a kid on a swing)

he liked killing children.
He pushed that thought aside. That wasn’t important right now. He was on a mission. He had been charged with this duty, and it was his responsibility to fulfill it, to rid society of the undesirables that the law and polite society were not willing to remove. He was a dragon slayer, a man uniquely equipped to solve this problem.
Like his father had been.

Funny thing: It’s all speculation about his dad. And towards the ends…. it seems that he was the only killer in his family.