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Camille, a furious grieving mother whose teenage daughter was raped and left to die by a golden boy college student, gets in touch with a group of mothers whose children were killed by people who suffered no consequences, and have a method for bringing down those consequences themselves.
The public group, Niobe, gives way to a darkweb group where the leader, 0001, sends Camille on gradually escalating tasks. Camille initially tells herself that it's a role-playing game that makes them all feel better, with no real world consequences; if she ever really believed that, which is doubtful, she quickly learns that it's a very elaborate version of Strangers on a Train: "You do my murder, and I'll do yours."
This book is an interesting balance of the classic and the extremely current; it's the opposite of the kind of "middle-aged writer discovers TikTok" that internet-heavy books can easily become, and instead is very sharp about internet forums, relationships with people whose real names you don't know, going viral, how support groups can be both life-saving and an unhealthy kind of marinating in other people's pain, and, offline as well as on, moral dilemmas, grief, injustice, and rage.
Despite the heavy subject matter, it's a very fast, compelling read. The plot is clever, if implausible, up until the last couple twists which tip into ridiculous.
This sort of revenge story usually ends up finger-wagging about how revenge is bad really, which is annoying because everyone who reads it wants to enjoy the wish-fulfillment of killing rapists, racists, and murderers who the law refuses to touch.
The main failure mode of "revenge/vigilantism is bad really" is the shocking reveal that the people in charge of the revenge are pure evil - they say they're just trying to save the environment/take out rapists, but really they're doing it all for personal profit, don't care if an entire preschool is collateral damage, and so forth. I always feel like this is a cheap and easy way out that allows the writer to avoid tackling deeper moral dilemmas, and is annoying for the reader who gets told their enjoyment of reading revenge is bad actually.
The Collective has a good long stretch of avoiding that in favor of a more thoughtful examination of the actual pitfalls of this type of revenge scheme, like the difficulty of knowing exactly how justified you really are, the necessity of trusting people who may not be trustworthy, and the impossibility of building a vigilante network without having to kill innocents to protect the network as a whole.
It also, more interestingly, digs into some real-life moral problems. If it's okay for the mother of a victim to do wrong in the effort to avenge her child, is it okay for the mother of a killer to do wrong in the effort to protect her child? Is it worth pursuing legal methods of stopping harmful people in a corrupt system that still sometimes does the right thing? How do you wrap your head around a person who does both genuine good deeds and genuine bad ones?
And then it drops all that in favor of piling on a stack of goofy, unnecessary, last-minute SHOCK TWISTS!
( Ending spoilers )
The Collective is an Anthony Award nominee for best novel. Despite its flaws, its ambition puts it head and shoulders above the other one I've read so far, Tracy Clark's enjoyable but average PI novel Runner.
The public group, Niobe, gives way to a darkweb group where the leader, 0001, sends Camille on gradually escalating tasks. Camille initially tells herself that it's a role-playing game that makes them all feel better, with no real world consequences; if she ever really believed that, which is doubtful, she quickly learns that it's a very elaborate version of Strangers on a Train: "You do my murder, and I'll do yours."
This book is an interesting balance of the classic and the extremely current; it's the opposite of the kind of "middle-aged writer discovers TikTok" that internet-heavy books can easily become, and instead is very sharp about internet forums, relationships with people whose real names you don't know, going viral, how support groups can be both life-saving and an unhealthy kind of marinating in other people's pain, and, offline as well as on, moral dilemmas, grief, injustice, and rage.
Despite the heavy subject matter, it's a very fast, compelling read. The plot is clever, if implausible, up until the last couple twists which tip into ridiculous.
This sort of revenge story usually ends up finger-wagging about how revenge is bad really, which is annoying because everyone who reads it wants to enjoy the wish-fulfillment of killing rapists, racists, and murderers who the law refuses to touch.
The main failure mode of "revenge/vigilantism is bad really" is the shocking reveal that the people in charge of the revenge are pure evil - they say they're just trying to save the environment/take out rapists, but really they're doing it all for personal profit, don't care if an entire preschool is collateral damage, and so forth. I always feel like this is a cheap and easy way out that allows the writer to avoid tackling deeper moral dilemmas, and is annoying for the reader who gets told their enjoyment of reading revenge is bad actually.
The Collective has a good long stretch of avoiding that in favor of a more thoughtful examination of the actual pitfalls of this type of revenge scheme, like the difficulty of knowing exactly how justified you really are, the necessity of trusting people who may not be trustworthy, and the impossibility of building a vigilante network without having to kill innocents to protect the network as a whole.
It also, more interestingly, digs into some real-life moral problems. If it's okay for the mother of a victim to do wrong in the effort to avenge her child, is it okay for the mother of a killer to do wrong in the effort to protect her child? Is it worth pursuing legal methods of stopping harmful people in a corrupt system that still sometimes does the right thing? How do you wrap your head around a person who does both genuine good deeds and genuine bad ones?
And then it drops all that in favor of piling on a stack of goofy, unnecessary, last-minute SHOCK TWISTS!
( Ending spoilers )
The Collective is an Anthony Award nominee for best novel. Despite its flaws, its ambition puts it head and shoulders above the other one I've read so far, Tracy Clark's enjoyable but average PI novel Runner.
