KILLING THE GIRL
by Elizabeth Hill
In Hill’s dark thriller, a troubled teenaged girl murders her serially unfaithful boyfriend and wrestles with the psychological fallout of her crime.
In 1969 England, Carol Cage is only 15 years old, still reeling from the sudden death of the father she adored and losing herself in the books he bequeathed her. When she meets Frankie Dewberry, a 19-year-old “posh boy from London” who hails from a wealthy family that inhabits the “borders of royalty,” she is immediately taken in by his flirtatious charms. They begin a relationship, and Carol falls deeply in love with him, but Frankie is a relentless womanizer, committed to pursuing sexual conquests and equally intent upon lying about them. Ultimately, Carol becomes pregnant with his child, Francine, and as a result his wealthy aunt, Thora Kent, makes financial provisions for Carol and her forthcoming child—but cuts out Frankie due to his delinquency. For all of his charm, Frankie is morally wayward and a shiftless, irresponsible young man who seems permanently allergic to maturity. In this atmospherically haunting tale, Carol, traumatized by Frankie’s betrayals, murders him with the help of a neighbor named Perry Cutler—he has his own lurid interests in the crime. The pair buries Frankie in an apple orchard. Decades later, Carol, beleaguered by mental instability, reflects on her transgressions and what they reveal about her character; her chillingly unhinged introspection is artfully conveyed by the author in powerfully spare prose. (“I’m not a killer. I’m someone who makes bad choices.”) In the aftermath of Frankie’s death, Carol pivots toward Perry, engaging in a peculiar social arrangement that perversely pantomimes marriage—he is her “guardian and [her] jailor.”
At the heart of the plot is Carol’s psychological state—she is by turns precociously bright and emotionally volatile, and the pendulum swings of her affect are as fascinating as they are discomfiting. Hill exercises an impressive authorial restraint, only slowly revealing the volatility at the heart of Carol’s fragile psyche. What often appears to be her fortitude—she can be uncommonly brave and assertive—can just as easily be interpreted as psychological dysfunction. She is a remarkably complex heroine, at times thoroughly sympathetic and at other times morally grotesque. She is in most respects an ordinary girl, but the premature death of her father, and her mother’s emotional distance, have damaged her in a way that is both obvious and challenging to fully articulate (after all, a certain measure of emotional inconstancy is a perfectly natural feature of adolescence). The novel as a whole is grippingly unpredictable—Carol acts as an unreliable narrator in the story, and the reader will likely be unprepared for some extraordinary twists at the book’s conclusion. Hill has composed a suspenseful narrative, and a grimly insightful one as well, that is both intelligently composed and dramatically mesmerizing. This is a macabre and melancholic tale, but not a hopeless one; the reader is left with a sliver of a promise of redemption.A riveting novel exploring murder, perfidy, and love.