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)

MEGAN ABBOTT'S END OF EVERYTHING

It might become a challenge to discuss Megan Abbott's books without reference to the words 'fever' or 'dream'. Her first four novels approached the world of noir from the inside, or perhaps, in a genre where the protagonists are usually men, often superficially attractive (qualities we're supposed to judge in women) but possessed of one-track minds and/or half track brains, we might better say from the other side. This reclaiming of the world of noir has been, for me, the most interesting and original work done in the crime field in this new millennium.

Although her fifth novel, 2011's, The End Of Everything, is, on the face of it, a novel about adolescence, whose 'crime' sits mostly offstage while Abbott provides a stunning take on the power of sexuality, and the even greater power of repression. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense, because that is at heart what noir is all about at heart—the feeling a child has, of being caught in the grip of a force he or she cannot control, a primal urge beyond understanding or coping-- isn't that exactly what noir protagonists wind up feeling? That they are adults merely intensifies the predicament, intensifies the temperature of the fever dream in which it takes place.It's why the best noir is filmed in shadow, in fog, in haze, in darkness, where no one can see what is coming.

Lizzie and Evie are best friends, with Evie's older sister Dusty their glamorous role model, and Evie's father, Mr. Verver, as the perfect dad, at least in the mind of Lizzie, who's being raised by her single mother, who herself has just begun an affair. Then, Evie disappears, and it soon appears she has been kidnapped by the Verver's insurance agent, Mr. Shaw. But nothing, it seems, is the way it seems.

Although the setting appears to be the 1980s, but the story has the feel of the 1950s—so much so that it reminded me of Thomas H. Cook at his best, the same sort of emotional undercurrent which reveals itself in its own repression, that same sort of quiet build-up which goes beyond noir, but still stirs the perfect surface in search of the imperfections underneath. Abbott, through Lizzie's teenaged eyes, builds an undercurrent of sexual malice which permeates virtually every scene, boiling just beneath the surface. And Lizzie's perceptions are modern, the only really modern thing in the story—she is the author's stand-in, seeing a Fifties noirish reality beneath that 80s world. The reader feels like a youngster who's stumbled across their parents' cache of steam-covered 50s paperbacks. So Mr. Verver, the seemingly perfect father, more and more takes on the appearance of a predator, an abuser, not so different perhaps from Mr. Shaw.

Except that Mr. Shaw is also not quite what he appears to be, and Evie's kidnapping is not quite that either. Without wanting to spoil the story, Abbott has also written a look back at Lolita, again, as I suggested at the start, told from the other side. After all, what is Nabokov's novel, if not a look at 1950s masculinity, and its fatal attraction to the unspoiled, perfect, uncomplaining, unthreatening femininity of the 50s teen, just starting to be sexualised in the post-war modern world.

It's a brilliant book, whose tone never falters, whose tension is wrenched tighter and tighter with each page, and whose vision is resolutely noirish. Megan Abbott's fiction remains fascinating in its obsessions, and in The End Of Everything, she takes them out of their classic setting, and proves she can make them work on a wider, more surprising canvas.

The End Of Everything by Megan Abbott
Picador, £7.99, ISBN 9780330518314