Killer on the prowl

Vikrant Parmar

ASERIAL killer on the rampage, fear looming large; blood, sweat, chills and thrills — Stephanie Perkins' novel There's Someone Inside Your House has it all.  

The scene of action is Osborne, Nebraska, where Makani Young has recently moved in with her grandmother after a secretive past in Hawaii. Her ‘parents couldn't agree on anything’, except that they allow her to move out of their life of irreconcilable differences. 

Makani, who needed a fresh start in Nebraska, always ‘felt an unsettling tinge of exposure’. She is, however, bailed out of her dilemma by a couple of friends, Alex and Darby, and an erstwhile boyfriend-turned-friend-turned-boyfriend again, Ollie, who is braving it out with her in almost all tense moments. 

Situations change very quickly though and all does not remain hunky-dory for these bunch of youngsters; in a series of gruesome murders, one by one students of Makani's small town high school are killed. Overnight, every student becomes a potential target and the entire town, including the cops, is  in a tizzy. 

The slaughtering is indeed gory… ‘The body lay on the floor like a slaughtered calf. Blood pooled beneath it’ … and the killer seems someone with no remorse whatsoever. He moves among the shadows inside the victims’ houses and kills with surgical precision, probably after meticulous reconnaissance and planning. What surprises, however, is how the killer manages to gain access to the houses and quietly hide behind some curtain or the other without being noticed! Once it is acceptable, but after the entire town goes into vigilance mode, his getting into any premise unnoticed seems a bit unpalatable. With cops in hot pursuit and youngsters joining hands to fight back, it is quite improbable. 

As the terror grows and the hunt intensifies for the killer, Makani is forced to confront her own ‘dark secrets’. She thought she had suffered enough in the hands of life — she’d lost everything that mattered to her in Hawaii, ‘but the karmic circle of life had circled back around’; so she lives in constant fear of the killer, who wields the machete with utmost disdain.

The fact that the killer’s identity is clearly revealed during the latter half of the novel is quite a damp squib. Once known, the rest of the action is all about trapping and bringing him to book. The suspense is, willy-nilly, lost in the melee. Reasoning, too, falls prey to hazy explanations; the killer, once in the trap, says ‘This is just something I have to do’.

The language is simple, yet quite racy. The characterisation is good, as also diverse. The setting is creepy and the body count massive. Barring a few digressions, where action wanes into lengthy dialogue and meaningless change of scene, the plot mostly stays in place. The story is quite akin to Hollywood potboilers that have been seen before and sure has a chance of becoming one itself!