The Minus Man

Lew McCreary

Publisher:
Grove Press

Release Date:
August 1999

Genres:
Suspense

ISBN:
Print
9780802136749

Bookmark Rating:

 

Reviewed by
G. Greenleaf

Review Posted:
August 2008

Vann is a likable guy.  Quiet, well mannered, hard working, and good-looking, he may have a beer-if you can talk him into it.  However, his secret life’s passion would cause everyone to recoil from this not so squeaky-clean person:  he thrills at murdering total strangers. 

THE MINUS MAN by Lew McCreary relates the double life of Vann Siegert: average citizen in the harsh light of day, solitary killer under the darkness of his own twisted psyche. Written several years ago and re-released in conjunction with a film based upon the tome, McCreary presents a figure who’s such a common Joe that no one would guess that beneath the placid facade belies a serial killer who lives only to kill. 

Poison is Vann’s method of luring victims to their final rest, though through Vann’s rationalization, “victims” really isn’t the proper term.  Rather, he sees the fatalities as people who were seeking him, as if awaiting a gentle soul to put them out of life’s misery.  And gentle he is, witnessing their demise with child-like wonder as they quietly pass from one life to the next like a bereaved relative watching a loved one fade away at a hospice.  

Told in a convincing first-person narrative that allows the reader the opportunity to walk a mile in a sociopath’s shoes, THE MINUS MAN follows Vann as he randomly drives across country, from the west coast to the east coast, seeking something that not even he knows.  Whether through kismet or random chance, he vicariously ends his trek and decides to temporarily stay in a small Massachusetts town.  It’s here he rents a room from a kindly couple.  The husband, an postal employee and an immediate Vann fan, offers Vann work for the approaching Christmas season.  It’s in this sleepy town -- a base of operation, of sorts -- that Vann does what he needs to do when the urge calls, an automaton following an internal beckoning.  

Though unable to stop and emotionally shell-shocked, Vann occasionally feels pangs of paranoia for his crimes.  Will the police arrest him at any moment-or are they just waiting for him to strike again?  Is he being followed?  If so, by whom? Is it the police or a victim’s loved one who finally caught up to him?   Vann’s sense of insecurity is curiously heightened by murders that occur within the proximity of his temporary home-crimes he had nothing to do with.  Are those “his” police driving by, or someone else’s?  He cannot stop wondering. Neither can the reader.        

Flashbacks not only provide a respite from Vann’s relating of daily events or his dark escapades, but also serve to humanize a person who characterizes himself as having no emotions, no human attachments, (After a fellow postal employee practically throws herself at him, he goes through the rote actions of courtship.), not even a sense of taste.  One, concerning his childhood that inadvertently set the stage for future events, and the second, the death of a sibling--perhaps the only human Vann ever cared.  A third underplot concerns imagined dialogues with detectives once he’s finally been nabbed; yet so lucid are the episodes that the readers must wonder whether these are imagined or prophetic.  

Beside the engaging story of THE MINUS MAN, McCreary’s prose is top-notch. Far beyond the slew of contemporary best selling authors whose passion for writing has long since evaporated (as well as any original plots), the reader can easily distinguish this author’s love for language as he records his antihero’s deeds.  Fiction like this is rare; a mélange of Jim Thompson’s “noirish” protagonists featured in such books as THE KILLER INSIDE ME meets the ebullient prose of Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY. Much unlike Bret Easton Ellis’s throwaway tome American Psycho, McCreary manages to not only capture the reader’s empathy for Vann Siegert, but tease them with glimmer of hope for this killer without a cause.  Suspenseful to the last page, the book succeeds where the film fell flat.   

But isn’t that always the case?

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