HEAD CASE
By Jay Bonansinga
Simon & Schuster, 318 pages, $23
While he has only a small number of novels to his credit, Jay Bonansinga has quickly and firmly established himself as one of the most imaginative writers of thrillers. His twisting narratives, with their in-your-face glimpses of violence, are set in an unstable, almost psychotic universe that makes the work of many of his contemporaries look rather tame. Balancing the pain is Bonansinga’s dark, absurdist sense of humor. In his previous book, “The Killer’s Game”–in which a professional hitman mistakenly puts out a million-dollar contract on his own life–the author turns the ensuing hunt into a bloody comic opera, as assassins from all over the world compete to knock off the main character. Bonansinga’s latest, “Head Case,” is an even darker tale, combining elements of H.P. Lovecraft and the Hong Kong cinema into a disturbing story of serial murder.
In a small rehabilitation clinic south of Chicago, a patient who had been struck by a semitruck on a highway comes out of a coma with total amnesia. Named John Doe by the staff, he struggles for several days to recall his past but only comes up with bits of melodies from old jazz records and images of slabs of meat.
Then a visitor shows up at the facility claiming to be John’s brother who had stumbled across his photograph in a local newspaper. When the two go for a walk in the woods, the visitor pulls a gun, identifies himself as a cop, says, “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” and drags John into a car. But John escapes after a car accident and steals another vehicle–and this is where the book’s central nightmare begins.
Winding up in a small Illinois town, John gets the name of private investigator Jessie Bales out of the local phone book, goes to her house and asks for help in figuring out his identity. The trail leads to a seedy hotel along the highway where John had been struck. The clerk at the front counter nervously recalls that John had stayed there and that he had insisted that no one enter his room to clean it. When John and Bales step inside the room, they find it filled with photos of dead women and slaughterhouses. “This is not me,” pleads John to Bales, who believes him despite the macabre evidence to the contrary. While they stare at each other, another cop shows up waving his gun, and John takes off into the woods, with the cop–and Bales–in pursuit.
What follows is a long chase–from Chicago all the way to Michigan State University–with John and Bales first fleeing the police, and later running from a murderer who seems to be shadowing them. Along the way, clues to John’s real identity are slowly revealed, including his passion for theater while in college, a passion that was later transferred to his work in psychology, particularly on multiple-personality disorder.
Bonansinga has come up with some fresh angles on one of the most overused plots in the thriller genre: the hunt for a serial killer. Man-on-the-run tales are notoriously easy to start, but they require panache and invention to pull them through to the end. Fortunately, Bonansinga has prodigious amounts of both. Not only does he put John through the physical and emotional wringer before he lets the poor guy find his identity, but he even finds time to give the sexy and available Bales a cute little daughter for the reader to worry about.
In the hands of a less inventive writer, all of this would be an exercise in melodrama, but for most of its length, “Head Case” is an exhilarating, disturbing piece of entertainment filled with much pain and some hope.
