Creep will be available for purchase on July 5. To pre-order, you can go there.
Country: USA/Canada
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 357
When I was a teenager, I read thrillers a lot. For me, they bridged the gap in between Young Adult fiction and Stephen King novels, which were my target back then. By the time I was seventeen, I have read so many John Grisham books that I still since when I see them on the shelves, at the store. Thriller is a genre that has been beaten into the ground by a streak of mediocre writers and abuse of Hollywoodian clichés, so I was a little worried when I picked up Jennifer Hillier's Creep. Fortunately, she was able to work her way around the majority of clichés of the genre and write a solid psychological thriller about psychology scholars. I know it sounds a little weird when said like that, but it's a story that gets under your skin. The characters of Creep are complex, compelling and most important, they are human.
Sheila Tao, Creep's main protagonist is quite the interesting lady. She's your typical role model for young girls. Smart, strong willed and good looking, she's in an authority position and she's doing it as good or better than any male around. She had a smart, rich and somewhat athletic boyfriend with whom she's deeply in love. But Sheila's not the static image so often employed in thriller novels. She had a catastrophic first wedding, which she slaved over for close to ten years and she's still emotionally fragile because of it. Feelings of abandonment after divorce sent her spiraling down in sex addiction, but she has been a good girl since she met her boyfriend Morris. Shit hit the fan when her estranged father died and she relapsed with her student Ethan. But then, Morris proposes to her and she wants to resume being a good girl. But Ethan doesn't take too kindly to rejection.
A good thriller doesn't work without an amazing villain and Ethan Wolfe passes the test with flying colors. The amazing thing about him is that his grievance is absolutely justified. Sheila wants to dump him like and old sock on the side of the road to go back to her Harlequin romance...and he's rightfully pissed. Now, Ethan is a psychopath for sure, he overreacts to Sheila's rejection way too hard. But not for the first hundred pages, where you're being kept in one of those moral grey zones I love to read. Jennifer Hillier has tapped into something very male, an anger present in most men I know. A lot of girls I know dream of the rich prince they can walk away with, in the sunset. It's a little girl thing. It's an idea implemented deep into the mind during childhood. Things that don't match with that vision usually get flushed down the drain. But Ethan doesn't want to go away. He's going to do anything to keep Sheila close. It's when Sheila starts kissing this perfect vision of her future goodbye that she grows as a person and starts taking measures to reclaim her life. It's a very dynamic confrontation, I couldn't stop reading those parts.
If I have one complain to make, it's that things develop into a trench war. One side against the other. It's very clean and no characters are morally doubtful for very long. They are good or evil. Morris could have been a great occasion, since he's a banker. People in that profession are some of the meanest humans alive. Playing with people's future every day (and sometimes wrecking it) makes you grow a thick skin and gives you a superiority complex. But Morris is more of the big athletic, kind-hearted lug that he was in his youth, than a cold-blooded banker. It's one of my pet peeves I guess. He's likeable and his feelings for Sheila are visceral. Creep is one of the classiest, yet meanest thriller I have read in years. Hillier keeps it on an intellectual level and doesn't take the easy road with gruesome scenes and voyeurism. Instead, she takes a dive in the dark corners of the human soul. Very good novel. Not perfect, but it's a damn good first novel. Keep an eye out for Jennifer Hillier. In a few years, you will witness acts of great violence in the book singing lines in her in-store appearances.