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A classic noir novel by the author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives.
A handsome young sociopathic decides to set himself up by romancing and marrying a young woman with a rich father; unfortunately, this plan depends on him not getting her pregnant until after they’re safely married. When he gets her pregnant before she’s even told her father he exists, he has only two choices: abortion or murder. The former proves difficult…
That’s just the first third of this perfect little thriller, which has a great narrative voice and a plot with the intricacy and neatness of an expensive pocket watch. It has a number of plot twists, several of which are genuinely surprising and which I have not seen imitated before. It’s less dated than it is a snapshot in time, and a quite atmospheric one at that. I read it in an evening, which I recommend as it’s short and also the sort of book where every little detail is going to turn out to be relevant.
This has been filmed twice; please don’t spoil me for how the movies changed things, as I either haven’t seen them or don’t remember them, and now I want to see them.
I particularly enjoyed the revelation of who Bud Corliss was and how neatly that was set up, the bit where you know the narrator has to be one of two men but you have no idea which, the schadenfreude and “how’s he going to get out of this?” of his panic after mailing a fake suicide note and then discovering his murder victim has failed to actually die, the sheer chutzpah of him methodically going after all three sisters, and the ending where the incident with the Japanese soldier that was mentioned on the very first page comes full circle, with him stepping into his very first victim’s shoes.
A Kiss Before Dying
A handsome young sociopathic decides to set himself up by romancing and marrying a young woman with a rich father; unfortunately, this plan depends on him not getting her pregnant until after they’re safely married. When he gets her pregnant before she’s even told her father he exists, he has only two choices: abortion or murder. The former proves difficult…
That’s just the first third of this perfect little thriller, which has a great narrative voice and a plot with the intricacy and neatness of an expensive pocket watch. It has a number of plot twists, several of which are genuinely surprising and which I have not seen imitated before. It’s less dated than it is a snapshot in time, and a quite atmospheric one at that. I read it in an evening, which I recommend as it’s short and also the sort of book where every little detail is going to turn out to be relevant.
This has been filmed twice; please don’t spoil me for how the movies changed things, as I either haven’t seen them or don’t remember them, and now I want to see them.
I particularly enjoyed the revelation of who Bud Corliss was and how neatly that was set up, the bit where you know the narrator has to be one of two men but you have no idea which, the schadenfreude and “how’s he going to get out of this?” of his panic after mailing a fake suicide note and then discovering his murder victim has failed to actually die, the sheer chutzpah of him methodically going after all three sisters, and the ending where the incident with the Japanese soldier that was mentioned on the very first page comes full circle, with him stepping into his very first victim’s shoes.
A Kiss Before Dying
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....man, I dunno if you want to see the 1991 film (Matt Dillon, Sean Young). Without spoiling, it was just sort of blah yet terrible.
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Film: Hmm. Too bad, I like the cast. There's an earlier movie though which also has a good cast, I might try that first if I can find it.
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There's something like that in Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man (1963) and it's one of the reasons I love the novel as deeply as I do; it's not exactly a twist, it's a reframing, and some audiences will catch it sooner than others, but it's central to the novel's entire project and I am pretty sure it renders the story unfilmable. Nothing that happens in the book makes any sense without it.
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Yeah, reframings are difficult to do in films, unless it's done with flashbacks showing "what really happened" and then the tension tends to drop and the audience can also feel suckered. I'm trying to think of good ones....Sixth Sense maybe? Jacob's Ladder? But those are more surprise twist endings, maybe, like "but he had REALLY been the murderer all along," which I don't think is quite the same thing. Hmm. Gone Girl did it in the middle, and Amy's and Nick's diaries were always undermining each other.
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The Sixth Sense is one of my standards for what a good twist ending looks like, because it is possible to put the pieces together before the reveal and it enhances rather than diminishes the audience's understanding of everything they have just seen; it's not a gotcha, it's grace. (And as far as I can tell, Shyamalan has never pulled it off again.) I don't know Jacob's Ladder.
Laura—1943 book and 1944 film—has a brilliant partway twist. I knew there was one I was thinking of.
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Laura! Oh, that's a good one. Oh, Vertigo would be another....
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I think the twist is less surprising now than it was when I saw it, but the movie holds up even if you already know or guess the twist. It's very atmospheric and eerie. There's one particular scene where he's on a hospital gurney that had stood out as being one of the creepiest things I've ever seen, and it still was.
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Cool. That's also one of the signs of a good twist—that it's not the only thing the movie has going for it. I will keep an eye out for it as well.
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For me the Creepiest Scene Ever is when he hears two words in IIRC a hospital room. First time I saw the movie my hair stood on end.
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Okay, that does sound relevant to my interests.
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I shall look for it.
The inconvenient pregnancy angle was reminding me of something, which turned out to be The Prowler (1951).
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I’ve been thinking about tension in fiction recently - King’s Revival had a great set piece - and about how, unlike straight out twists, it often relies on the reader knowing more than the characters: this was really useful.
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I had written off the stereotype as "of the times," but no, it was more "of the character."
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That TWIST, omg.
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I had the same feeling on everything, even though my favorite as a person was obviously the second one.
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Jo Walton wrote a review of it, and the first comment below it is from me.
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