THE CUTTING HOURS

Every mother's nightmare comes to life in this Psycho Comix tale of the knife-wielding misfit who gets fatally stuck on a suburban Michigan mother and daughter. Grice is also the author of Suspicion (1992—not reviewed). When Mickey McGee was her student in a sculpture class last year, Shay Wyoming noticed right away how precocious his work was—and how angry. Now Mickey's buzzing his Harley past her house every night, entrancing her budding daughter Kelly (``everyone said Kelly and Shay could be sisters''), who responds by doing a striptease in her bedroom window. Before long, Mickey's gone on to stalking Kelly through the local mall, riding his bike through Shay's studio, and trashing the place while they're off visiting Shay's sister in Connecticut, and even Kelly (``this was the most exciting and scary thing that had ever happened to her'') is ready to write this guy off. Too late: Mickey waits until Shay's off at a party—whose guests include Elmore Leonard, Loren D. Estleman, and fellow mystery writer Ben Lyte, Shay's patient man—and breaks into Shay's house, murdering the superfluous babysitter and dragging off Kelly on a hellbent murder spree as he races to get revenge on everybody in his bad books, from his whiny art teacher to his massively abusive father, before the suicidal confrontation with the police he's been engineering since his childhood. But Shay, engorged with powerful maternal love (``she loved her children so much. She really did'') and determined to set up a kinder, gentler showdown ahead of the planned police bloodbath, dopes out Mickey's most likely destination and waits there with the Tupperware pot of therapeutic clay that will reach the boy's alienated good side. Just about every clichÇ you need for a healthy day's supply of momma pulp.