PREY

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 1985

Here, Cline (Cross Current, Mindreader) writes a gripping Southern thriller whose dialogue has a touch of genius. The outstanding characters giving this psychopaths' delight its fresh bloom are Jeffrey Taylor, 11, whose I.Q. is 148, and his sister Elaine, 13, herself a near-enough genius to hold her own as Jeffrey predicts her every mood for her from Alice Miller's Prisoners of Childhood, which he is deep into. As is the plot, which is purest Miller. Truman Taylor, a sociopath, a terrorist and killer trained in Korea and Vietnam, dishonorably discharged and now rather courtly in his middle 50s (he quotes A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad while killing folks), has decided to avenge childhood injuries done to him, his slut sister Lana, and his alcoholic mother Renee by his father Sheriff Bo of Thomasville, Georgia. Truman is hounded by vile memories of Bo. Bo was 16 and six years younger than Renee, herself a slut, when she tricked him into marriage, then proved to be not pregnant. Soon, however, she had Truman and Lana. Then Truman, when 12, got it into his extremely twisted head that Bo was banging Lana, then nine. He tried to report this to the authorities, but Bo beat him nearly to death, then made Renee and the kids leave Thomasville. Recovering from his divorce, Bo married Annette, rose in the town to become permanently reelected sheriff and fathered three outstanding sons who became town mayor, the local publisher, and, after Bo dies, the new sheriff. Bo dies of a heart attack when Truman phones that he's returning--Bo has never told his new sons about his earlier snakes' nest of a family. We meet Truman in Kansas as he takes his nice wife Bonnie Blue-eyes (who calls him ""Truman, precious"") and little son Chuckle out into a wheatfield and shoots them dead. He can't have thoughts of them blunting his revenge, and Chuckle. after all, is the son of a son who should never have been born. Then, using terror tactics, Truman begins phoning announcements of his forthcoming arrival in Thomasville while leaving a trail of serial murders behind him. When he finds out that BO is dead, Truman decides to kill his father ""ideologically"" as well, by destroying his reputation. But first he kidnaps genius Jeffrey and sister Elaine, children of the new sheriff Bradley Taylor, Bo's youngest, and locks them up in a pitch-black metal room in an abandoned icehouse. . . While we watch characters act out roles visited upon them by their parents, who are themselves victims of their parents, we are treated to superb talk between human beings that seems to have been saved up over a writer's lifetime for this special novel, especially the bookish little comments of Jeffrey, as when he looks over the garden of a big new house his family may buy: ""The ornamentals should be cut back severely. . . Uncle Jack!. . . We've decided to take this turkey.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: New American Library

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1985

Categories: FICTION