The Desperate Season

by Michael Blaine

Rob Weisbach Books, $24 hard

Someone will buy movie rights to The Desperate Season. This book has “big screen thriller” written all over it, especially since teenage violence is now dinner-table conversation. The plot: A severely schizophrenic teenager is accidentally released from a mental hospital, buys a machine gun on a lark, and terrorizes his family in a mountain cabin. Plot complications: family drama, including divorce, adultery, and guilt. Setting: an innocent mountain town (a hamlet) and weather to match the horror (snow, ice, dead batteries, zero visibility). Cast: Hollywood beauties (they’re beautiful in the book, so that’s not cheating). And to make it easier for the script doctors, this novel already has a peaceful ending. I say “peaceful” because it can’t be “happy” after so much murder. But love does prevail.

When the novel is made into a film, author Michael Blaine will have to steel himself for loss, however. Each character narrates, so the story builds according to the psychological and emotional blueprint of everyone involved. The most jarring voice is the murderous teenager, Maurice: “I feel like my body is just smoke puffing up my clothes and I can leak away any second.” Maurice has thrown away his anti-psychotics so he can “get back in touch with [his] old mind.” It’s that old mind that is brilliant, dangerous, and seeking nonsensical revenge against parents who may not have loved him enough. When he starts tormenting his family, his mother, Moira, forces herself to think of Maurice as “the Shell.” Moira thinks, “If we die, we will be killed by the Shell, not my son — ”

The book is painted on the backdrop of family guilt. Who made Maurice this way? Could anyone have done more to help him? Could they have loved him more despite his sickness? Could they have protected him from the others? Father, mother, sister, and family friends get caught up in the culpability of Maurice’s madness. It’s this internalized guilt, intermingled with love and passion, that Blaine might lose when his novel becomes film.

This article appears in October 1 • 1999.

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