As a kid, I always had better luck finding John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books than in locating the non-series tales. I ran across A Bullet for Cinderella on a spinner rack while visiting relatives in Camden, Arkansas, but that was the exception.
The rest of the long list of non-series books you'd find in the front of McGee titles eluded me, though I was intrigued by titles such as One Monday We Killed Them All, The Last One Left and Dead Low Tide.
I've worked at acquiring the stand-alone books for a while now, right after my love for MacDonald's work was re-activated when I was living in Texas and ran across The Crossroads in a shop mostly devoted to collectible hardcovers.
When I stumbled on an article mentioning Stephen King's praise of The End of the Night (1960) recently, I was happy to find it was among MacDonald Bookmooch acquisitions waiting on my shelf. Then, as mentioned above: that synopsis.
"Four drug-crazed young sadists--a world of damage. Driven by random, violent lusts they could barely articulate and understand, they embarked on a cross-country terror spree that left a trail of victims in its wake."
I don't shy away from grim tales, but I wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for a criminal-focused tale with dark results.
Still, I figured there must be something to King's assertion that it was "one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century." I cracked the cover and read the opening passage, a missive from a prison guard recounting the executions of said drug-crazed young sadists.
That's a bold opening move, telling us how things end before falling back to reveal how events converged to drive everything to that point. I kept reading and discovered the piece never lacked for suspense despite the early reveal.
I read on and was drawn in, because the MacDonald magic took over, mesmerizing with a collection of well-drawn characters plus trial memos, death house diary entries and outside accounts that reveal the dark happenstance that connect killers and victims.
Riker Deems Owen, attorney for the four, perhaps defending his courtroom loss, defines their relationships and prepares the way for a framing and engrossing account of Helen Wister, a young woman trying to let an infatuated suitor down as she plans for her marriage to another, a young architect.
Then we drop into the eloquent journal of Kirby Stassen, college dropout turned participant in the crime spree, and we learn of his long path from New York and brushes with show business to Acapulco and a misguided romance with an older woman that primed him for his soul-dead excursion with the Sander Golden who's manipulating brutish Robert Hernandez and Nanette Koslov. Perhaps his diary is too eloquent and perceptive for his years, but that's a bit of license worth granting this novel.
Once connected the four are dubbed the Wolf Pack by the press, and their spree gains national notoriety with reverberations of Charles Starkweather's spree and the Richard Hickcock/Perry Smith In Cold Blood murder case.
Stassen recounts their humiliation and murder of a tile salesman but chooses not to delve into even more brutal events in Nashville where even he admits things were woefully out of hand.
Objectively the story continues via a never-named narrator who details the FBI dragnet and the fateful encounter between Wister and the band, building toward a culmination and epilogue that reveals tiniest glimmer of affirmation.
Its power is in both its exploration of the random, circuitous paths that lead to destruction, and its glimpse into at least a part of what drives random killers even beyond drug-induced dissociation.
Given King's affection for the work and his friendship with and admiration for MacDonald, I suspect it was an influence on the complexly-structured It, which features an architect protagonist as well.)
The End of the Night is a dark ride, but I'm glad I pushed past the synopsis because it's not as nihilistic as the cover might suggest. Don't judge a book by it's back cover.
Impulse buy
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