MEGAN ABBOTT'S YOU WILL KNOW ME: BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF NOIR

Devon Knox is an immensely promising young gymnast, despite having lost two toes in an accident with a lawn mower when she was just three. She's worked obsessively hard, and her parents, Eric and Katie, have had to work just as hard, and make serious sacrifices, devoting themselves to her career. But when the handsome young assistant coach at her gym is killed in a hit and run, the finely tuned cocoon around her begins to come apart, and the family face difficult choices as blame and suspicion permeate their tightly-wrapped world fraught with competition, pressure, and jealousy.

All parents know that feeling that 'one morning you wake up and there is this alien in your house', but even as she says it Megan Abbott is reinforcing the darkness behind it with the story of cave fish who, when seeing their parents for the first time, still cannot be seen by them. Around this tension flows the classic noirish theme of the man with the one-train mind, but half-track brain; the innocents and the temptresses, tempered by the family and 'the smell of chloraseptic and panic'.

One of the beauties of Abbott's writing is the way she can transform the most mundane narrative into a dream-like state, where the characters are fighting as much with fate as with each other. This would come as no surprise to readers of her first five novels, with titles like Die A Little and Bury Me Deep, which drew on classic film noir themes and settings, in a way which heralded her as an original and unique voice in crime writing. You Will Know Me is her ninth novel; the last four have been set in a suburban world that is indeed more mundane, but every bit as threatening as the world of those earlier books.

I was surprised the marketing people didn't try to retitle this one something like The Girl On The Balance Beam, in an attempt to lure in that 'Girl whatever' audience. But You Will Know Me is a title which points the way to what this story is at heart, a true noir thriller. At a time when everything from Danish political dramas to cozy kitchen mysteries has the label 'noir' slapped on it, rendering the term virtually meaningless, what Abbott has done is to drawn out the essence of noir from these modern settings, and subtly transmuted the basics of noir to serve her purposes. There's a touch of Thomas H Cook in this, a bigger touch of Dorothy Hughes, but each of Abbott's novels has had its own approach to this darkness. Her dilemma is how to make our world and its optimism jibe with the futility that lurks at the heart of the world of noir.

She does it with the help of the kind of classical allusions that Devon's injury recalls, as much Nathaniel Hawthorne as James M Cain, as well as the contemporary (Amanda Knox?). The dreamy images of seeing, of illness, of fever, that run through the tale draw you into its world. They immerse you in its uncertainty. Not in the mystery puzzle sense, but in the sense of how does life continue? how is life measured? how do children grow up and parents help and hinder them? It brings the dilemmas of real noir down to an everyday level, which, if you study it, is the essence of noir, the everyday turned upside down. This tale of everyday obsession may well be Megan Abbott's finest piece of writing to date, which means it is exceptional.

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Picador, £14.99, ISBN 9781447226352

MEGAN ABBOTT'S GOT THE FEVER

Deenie Nash is a teen-aged girl in a cold, gray town in the northern USA. Her brother is a star hockey player, her father teaches at their high school, her divorced mom lives a few towns away. Her circle of friends is fraught with imbalance, the imperfect mixings along the chain, the way the emotions of love and sex intensify at different paces. So far so normal for small-town America. And then Deenie's friend Lise collapses in fits, struck, as if possessed by a mystery illness which, as it spreads, threatens to bring the whole town down into chaos.

The brilliance of Megan Abbott's seventh novel is the way it constantly shifts the ground from beneath you, the way it moves between tropes and genres almost effortlessly. What is The Fever? Is it a teen-aged thriller about the fragile psyches of girls on the brink of womanhood, in a society where sex is out front all the time, but still treated as a dirty secret behind the curtain? Certainly the adults of the earlier generation do nothing to ease their children through this ever-earlier ritual of so-called maturity? Is it a novel about the abuse of modern science? Were vaccinations to help prevent sexual infections responsible for these fits? Is it about mass-hysteria, a Crucible-like dissection of the weakness of adult society in the face of the power and threat inherent in young sexuality? Or is there a supernatural force at work, enacting a horror-movie's babysitter retribution against these girls when they hit sexual activity? At times Abbott seems to be writing a sharply literate take on the 'weird menace' stories from pulp magazines like Strange Tales, playing a very-knowing three-card monte trick with the enthralled reader.

This knowing approach should not surprise anyone who's followed Megan Abbott's career. Her first four novels, Die A Little, The Song Is You (see my review here), Queenpin, and Bury Me Deep were noir fictons, but with a difference; not so much told from a woman's perspective but with the classic sexual tropes of noir reversed. Abbott's first book, The Street Was Mine, was study of masculinity in hardboiled fiction and film noir; her early novels were filling in the other side of the story. It was something new to crime writing, something she made her own.

With her fifth novel, The End Of Everything, she switched gears. It's easy to see where the now-common comparisons with Gillian Flynn arose, especially once the book was named a Richard and Judy selection in Britain. But the story of a disappeared 13-year girl, told from the point of view of her best friend, reads like Flynn crossed with Vin Packer, a deft mix of coming-of-age girlhood, the spectres of paedophilia and incest, and the desperate intensity and doom of Fifties pulp. I wrote then (you can read my review here) comparing the novel to Lolita, about her fascinating obsessions, and I stand by that now. What I've written above may seem overly analytical, but the remarkable thing about Abbott's writing is how much it suggests and stands up to such analysis, and how engrossing it is on its pure story-telling basis. There is a dream-like sense in her prose, a fever-dream we follow through to the end. I marvel at the result. Megan Abbott may be the most original crime writer of the past decade, and she should be treasured by readers of all sorts of fiction.

The Fever by Megan Abbott

Picador, £14.99, ISBN 9781447226321

note; this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimtime.co.uk)