Do you like dark and gritty suspense novels that threaten to make even the strongest of constitutions a little faint? How would you feel if satanic cults were blamed to be involved as one disturbed ward of the system is witnessed killing his foster parents? What if the witnesses were young teens, traumatized and unsure of what they witnessed? Were they having a mass episode of hysteria? Were they truly watching a satanic ritual in progress or were they so confused, they were unable to differentiate fact from fiction?

Feel something vile crawling under your skin, feel morbid curiosity and dread fear that this could really happen in a society as lost and unstable as ours can be.

Dan Chaon will take us into a world beyond our control, beyond our comfort zones and into the world of ILL WILL where the villain is actually a victim himself and may truly NOT be the villain after all. As this tale is told, oen man will relive the times he remembers as a horror, after he hears his foster brother will be released from his life sentence, because guess what, he didn’t do the crime. So who did? Will Dustin’s brother Rusty seek revenge?

As Dustin gets roped into another cold case by one of his patients, he finds himself tumbling headlong into the dark abyss of murder, mystery and strange tie-ins to his brother’s case. A Psychologist be trade, has Dustin’s own fear of his brother’s return set him on a path of discovery that will reveal more than he bargained for?

Very dark, with a heavy and ominous feel, this chaotic read will send you into a twisted world where fact and fiction become stuck in a murky quagmire that threatens to never let you go.

I received an ARC edition from Ballantine Books in exchange for my honest review.

Publisher: Ballantine Books (March 7, 2017)
Publication Date: March 7, 2017
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Print Length: 480 pages
Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble 
For Reviews & More: http://tometender.blogspot.com

4.5 Stars

"We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves."

Ill Will is infused with a dark aura, an atmosphere of hazy confusion, a sense of an impending tragedy. Dread, a mysterious presence that is woven throughout this novel, like an insidious fog creeping under the doorway, into the home and the lives of those inside. So subtle, at first, that they never notice how much has changed, that they are no longer seeing things as they are, or maybe even as they were.

Dustin is a psychologist, his parents died along with his Aunt and Uncle when he was thirteen, thirty years ago. Killed. His adopted brother Rusty has been in prison ever since, convicted of their murder, but has recently been released. They have DNA proof that he is not the murderer, and with the help of The Innocence Project, he has been exonerated.

Dustin and his cousin Kate testified against Rusty, with wild tales of sacrifices and satanic rituals. Kate’s twin sister Wave did not, believing Rusty innocent. Needless to say, this has created some tension in the years following, but with Rusty out of prison, tensions rise even more. Adding to this is the fact that Dustin’s wife, Jill, mother of his two sons, is dying.

As the news sinks in, old memories are revisited, again and again. Questioned. Transformed over time so that now the lines of what was once clear are softer, hazy. Like an unreliable dream.

This is only the beginning.

Every time I felt I was starting to believe I knew where this was going, I would be pulled in another direction, leaving me to recalibrate, as though the ground had slowly gone a bit off-kilter.

Narrated from multiple perspectives, this will frustrate those who like every detail of a mystery neatly wrapped up for them. It doesn’t always happen, in life or in novels. There is, in fact, more than one mystery to solve - however like a puzzle being pieced together with 480 pieces out of a 500 piece puzzle, you’ll know what you can see, and have to imagine what goes in those blank spaces.

This novel will frustrate those who don’t like writers experimenting with writing structure… Chaon allows sentences drift off into nothing, following Dustin’s speech patterns that his family finds… amusing, annoying. They have become used to finishing his sentences for him. You really feel this rather than just being told this – his incomplete thoughts seemed to add a sense of his detachment to everything. There’s several sections where there are narratives written in a side-by-side format, appearing almost as if they were newspaper columns clipped and entered as comparisons. These may lead you down certain paths, thinking perhaps you know what’s happened in the past, what will happen in the future, and who, really, is responsible. But, really, whose memory can be trusted?


Pub Date: 07 Mar 2017

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House - Ballantine

4:52 A. M. That’s what time I finished Dan Chaon’s Ill Will and turned out the light to try to sleep. Ill Will is disconcerting, an exploration of memory and its unreliability, family and its unreliability, and narrative and its unreliability. On the surface, it’s the story of Dustin, a psychologist whose parents were murdered thirty years ago. Just as Dustin learns that his older foster brother Rusty, who has served thirty years in prison for murdering their parents, aunt, and uncle, has been freed by The Innocence Project, his wife Jill tells him she is dying. Meanwhile, a patient named Aqil is pushing a conspiracy theory that several area drownings over the past decade are really the work of a serial killer, perhaps even a cult of killers.

When his parents were murdered long ago, thirteen year-old Dustin and his cousin, Kate, testified against Rusty. They described satanic rituals he performed, tying him to the Satanic Ritual Panic that engulfed America in the past. Kate’s sister was there that night, too, but did not testify and rejected Dustin and Kate’s narrative. Rusty wants to talk it out, but when Dustin refuses to return his calls, he begins calling Aaron, Dustin’s youngest son. Aaron, reeling at the loss of his mother is sinking into heroin addiction and hanging with some very doubtful characters.

When Jill dies, Dustin finds distraction in Aqil’s conspiracy, joining him in interviewing the family and friends of some of the victims and looking for a missing, suspected next victim. Aqil is quite the unreliable and sketchy character himself, but Dustin’s suspicions and skepticism fade. After all, if he were not investigating this with urgency, then he would be alone and idle and mourning his wife. It is so much easier to seek a satanic cult than face his grief.

Ill Will is going to stay with you for a while if you read it. It does not present a straightforward narrative though most of your questions will be answered. Central questions, though, will remain. What really happened thirty years ago? Did Dustin and Kate lie out of malice or because they believed it was true? Perhaps their narrative was true but the inference based on the narrative was wrong. Who is telling the truth?

Chaon experiments with narrative, not just with telling multiple narrators in the past and present  in the first, second, and third person. He’s got unfinished sentences, fragments, disjointed and broken narratives. There’s a section of side by side narratives that start  and end, sometimes in mid-sentence, without connecting, but still moving us forward, revealing more and more of the story. We come to know a lot, but with uncertainty.

If you like your mysteries tied up with a neat bow, the dead buried, the killer arrested, and every question answered, Ill Will is going to frustrate you. If uncertainty intrigues and fascinates you, Ill Will will satisfy. No matter what kind of reader you are, Ill Will will keep you up at night.

Ill Will will be released on March 7th. I received an advance e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.

A definite psychological mystery. The author goes into the dynamics of family and how abuse and tragedy can be carried through the generations. Rusty is an abused foster child. He is adopted into Dusty's family. Rusty brings with him a troubled and dark past. He inadvertently passes shadows of his abuse unto Dusty. 
Dust is now a psychologist, helping other troubled people. One of his patients is an odd, man named Aquil. Their strange relationship soon developed from doctor/patient to a friendship of sorts.
This is a read full of twists turns, mystery, and odd relationships. Interesting and intriguing. 
4 Stars

Dan Chaon’s American crime novel, “Ill Will,” is not for the fainthearted. It combines a violent murder set in the past combined with the chilling revelation of a serial killer stalking young college men in the present. There is no super detective or dedicated FBI agent who will save the day in either case. No. There is no relief from this novel’s remorse or psychological rage. And retribution will have its way. In fact, ill will stalks the novel’s characters like a cold fog seeping into every corner of their lives. For its probing character insight and its expansive analysis of how we think about crime, this is a true novel with an American crime landscape, from the plains of Nebraska to the strip malls of suburban Ohio to the farmhouses of Oregon. You may think of Leopold and Loeb, or Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, or John Wayne Gacy. Dustin Tillman, a practicing psychologist who the police sometimes consult with, is haunted by his past as one of the survivors of a famous bloody massacre. Right before a family vacation, his mother and father and uncle and aunt were brutally shot to death. Dustin’s older foster brother Rusty was arrested, tried and convicted almost immediately. Rusty was a strange, disconnected and violent person. He was a drug user and an abuser who once used Dustin sexually, but most condemning to the jury was his fascination with Satanism. Satanism was the boogey man of the nineteen-seventies. People were all too willing to believe that it was a threat -- not just that people held Black Sabbaths for fun but that the devil was actually involved. At the beginning of the novel, Rusty has just been released from prison thanks to the efforts of The Innocence Project. Simultaneously, Dustin has a patient -- a retired cop -- who convinces him a serial killer is at large, murdering college boys and dumping their bodies in various local rivers. After a while, Dustin befriends that patient against all the rules of professional conduct and joins with him in what Dustin thinks will be a successful investigation. Both crimes -- the massacre in the past and the serial murders in the present -- are expertly juggled by Chaon, whose novel “Among the Missing” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. The writing is crisp and expressive. But it is the plotting that will get you. You are drawn in and tantalized by horrible crimes, jumping back and forth in time, with hardly a moment to catch your breath. And when you get toward the end, you might, as I did, want to put the book down for a moment or two so that the whole great read won’t be over. But of course, you won’t be able to put it down for long. My verdict? Nothing but good will for “Ill Will." -- Janet Rotter

For me, this book was just a little too wordy, too complex despite the good story line. It was not a bad read, just a little frustrating.

If I had not agreed to review this book, I wouldn't have finished it. 

The book covers a 30- to 40-year time period and regularly jumps back and forth in time, sometimes on the same page. The cast of characters are universally physically ill, mentally ill, delusional, drug addicted, sexualy deviant, and unlikable. I can dislike characters and still find them interesting, but not in this case. 

The author seems to be working so hard to produce art that he forgot to tell a compelling story with interesting characters.

Remember in The 80s when Satanic rituals were to blame for everything ? This is the basis of this novel . Very dark and lots of character study this a tense novel. There are two mysteries to be solved.. Part crime thriller part  psychological thriller this chilling novel and the characters stick with you long after the last page is turned

This book is different,confusing at times as it jumps from journal-type writing to a storyline. It is a very dark book,very hard for me to get into what was happening for quite awhile,then became frustrating. Many questions left unanswered,a book about a very dysfunctional family,a murder years ago and a bunch of recent murders being "investigated" . There are many points where the 1980's media reporting of satanism is used,talking of cults and rituals they used. However I don't feel this had anything to do with the story. This book leaves me with no answers,not much enjoyment.

Ill Will by Dan Chaon, due to be released in March 2017, opens with Dustin Tillman, a 41 year old psychologist, learning that his adopted brother Russell has been released from prison after more than three decades, because DNA evidence has overturned his conviction for the brutal 1970's murder of both his parents and aunt and uncle. The murders were believed to be related to satanic cults. Not long after Russell's release, Aqil, a former cop and patient of Dustin's, involves Dustin in his unofficial investigation into a series of drownings that he believes are really serial murders, also with a satanic cult connection. These two crimes - the murders of Dustin’s parents, aunt and uncle, and the present-day serial killings -- provide the background and framework for a story that unfolds over more than three decades and through multiple points of view.

I had a difficult time understanding what this book was really about. It is quite long and sometimes seemed to lack direction. I was often confused as to where the story was going and how the two plot points connected. This was due in large part to the fact that I frequently found the writing muddled and disjointed. There were also a lot of unfinished sentences -- word strings that abruptly just stopped and sentences that seemed to be missing words. (Something at the end of the book made me think this may have been a plot device of some sort but it was still very distracting.) While the last 20% of the book was slightly better than the preceding 80%, I honestly don’t think I would have made it that far if I hadn’t been reading this for an ARC review. More than anything else, I felt this novel could really benefit from more editing, as both the rambling, convoluted writing style and unfinished sentences made the story line very difficult to follow.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

BookFilter review by one of my writers, Janet Rotter: Dan Chaon’s American crime novel, “Ill Will,” is not for the fainthearted. It combines a violent murder set in the past combined with the chilling revelation of a serial killer stalking young college men in the present. There is no super detective or dedicated FBI agent who will save the day in either case. No. There is no relief from this novel’s remorse or psychological rage. And retribution will have its way. In fact, ill will stalks the novel’s characters like a cold fog seeping into every corner of their lives. For its probing character insight and its expansive analysis of how we think about crime, this is a true novel with an American crime landscape, from the plains of Nebraska to the strip malls of suburban Ohio to the farmhouses of Oregon. You may think of Leopold and Loeb, or Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, or John Wayne Gacy. Dustin Tillman, a practicing psychologist who the police sometimes consult with, is haunted by his past as one of the survivors of a famous bloody massacre. Right before a family vacation, his mother and father and uncle and aunt were brutally shot to death. Dustin’s older foster brother Rusty was arrested, tried and convicted almost immediately. Rusty was a strange, disconnected and violent person. He was a drug user and an abuser who once used Dustin sexually, but most condemning to the jury was his fascination with Satanism. Satanism was the boogey man of the nineteen-seventies. People were all too willing to believe that it was a threat -- not just that people held Black Sabbaths for fun but that the devil was actually involved. At the beginning of the novel, Rusty has just been released from prison thanks to the efforts of The Innocence Project. Simultaneously, Dustin has a patient -- a retired cop -- who convinces him a serial killer is at large, murdering college boys and dumping their bodies in various local rivers. After a while, Dustin befriends that patient against all the rules of professional conduct and joins with him in what Dustin thinks will be a successful investigation. Both crimes -- the massacre in the past and the serial murders in the present -- are expertly juggled by Chaon, whose novel “Among the Missing” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. The writing is crisp and expressive. But it is the plotting that will get you. You are drawn in and tantalized by horrible crimes, jumping back and forth in time, with hardly a moment to catch your breath. And when you get toward the end, you might, as I did, want to put the book down for a moment or two so that the whole great read won’t be over. But of course, you won’t be able to put it down for long. My verdict? Nothing but good will for “Ill Will." -- Janet Rotter

Intriguing writing style. Like a cat on a hot tin roof. Weaving & Jumpy.

I thought Ill Will was very suspenseful and, at times, pretty creepy. I was well into the book before I really had a handle on the two murder investigations and how they related to each other. Not only did it keep me interested until the bitter end but it was quite the page-turner. I really had a hard time putting this one down.

Didn't want to like this book, but once the story grabbed me, couldn't put it down.

I do not have words to describe this book. 
This is a complex story, with various plots, that the author ingeniously knit together in an engaging kind of way. 
I think the main point is the not knowing, the uncertainty of the facts is what keeps you hooked up till the end.

Not a book I would read again. Very confusing and it just felt like the author took every awful thing that could ever happen to a child and stuck it in. 

I really had no love for any of the characters, because we really don't know any of them. A lot of time I didn't even know who was speaking. There was definitely no communication between characters. 

It took a lot for me to finish this one. I did finish it however and just went "Ew".

This is perhaps the most poorly written novel I have ever read! The chapters are less than one page long and bounce among several characters/situations with each chapter to the extent that I found it impossible to follow the thread of the book.

Really interesting, dark book. Reminded me a bit of Gillian Flynn's stuff. 

The story kind of floats along much like the lead character Dustin. You're never quite sure what is real or true. The shifting character perspectives add to the mystery. The whole thing is well done and well written. A few cons: I'm not sure I loved the 3 column layout for a few sections. I get what the author was going for, it just was a little annoying to read. Same goes for the sentences that. The sentences that end out of nowhere, like that last one just did. 

And that ending. This is not a great book to read if you're looking for a neat and tidy resolution. Now I don't need all loose ends to be wrapped up in the books I read, but I did have an AWFUL LOT of remaining questions on the last page (which is a testament to the writing) and that left me feeling frustrated.

While the basis of Ill Will dealt with stringing together narrations and memories from two different events/time periods in Dustin Tillman's life, the format of the story felt disjointed and unfinished in a way that left me feeling disconnected from both the characters and the plot. There was not only shifting between the past and the present, but also between characters - Dustin's son, his cousin Kate, etc. all become the focal point of certain chapters. From these narrative shifts to the chapters that end with unfinished sentences and thoughts, Ill Will just became to feel sloppy to me in its execution.

Thank you Netgalley and Ballantine Books for allowing me the chance to read this book in return for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Publishing for providing me with an ARC of Ill Will by Dan Chaon. Below is my unbiased review.

If you're looking for a warm, fuzzy feelgood read, look elsewhere! This book is dark, disturbing, disjointed and all kinds of terrifying. I finished this book in one day because I was completely caught up in the story.
Dustin, a middle age husband and father, survived a horrific crime in his childhood which was said to be committed by his foster brother, Russell. Now, thanks to DNA testing Russell has been exonerated and Dustin fears Russell may seek revenge. Meanwhile, Dustin is dealing with a crisis in his marriage and balancing his work as a psychologist. When a patient of Dustin, a former cop starts presenting Dustin with startling evidence of a possible serial killer, Dustin's fragile existence begins to implode.
Told through multiple perspectives and shifting narrators this thriller is gripping and riveting. 
Dan Chaon has written a smart crime and psychological thriller , that did not disappoint this reader.