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The Four Stages of Cruelty

by Keith Hollihan

Ditmarsh Penitentiary is a world unto itself, with its own hierarchies, social codes, twisted relationships, and history. It also has its own secrets, as corrections officer Kali Williams discovers early in The Four Stages of Cruelty, the harrowing debut novel from Keith Hollihan.

The novel begins with a disruption of routine, never a good thing in a maximum-security prison. Williams is assigned an unusual, off-the-books task: she must accompany and supervise Joshua, a young prisoner, as he attends his father’s funeral. Williams prides herself on her distance and detachment, both crucial for her career, but in a rare moment of empathy and compassion, she actually listens to Joshua, a man barely out of his teens serving time for the murder of his ex-girlfriend. When Joshua gives her a hand-drawn comic, she is sucked into a shadowy underworld operating inside Ditmarsh, a world of violence and torment that finds her isolated, unguarded, and ­unsure of whom among her closest companions she should trust.

Hollihan, a Newfoundland native ­living in St. Paul, Minnesota, completely ­immerses the reader in the prison milieu. The novel is the result of research Hollihan did following the incarceration of a friend, and the thoroughness of that research comes through in his brutal, utterly convincing depiction of the prison and its denizens on both sides of the bars.

He is somewhat less successful with the character of Williams. While compelling enough to follow for the length of a novel, there’s something undistinguished about her: too often she feels a bit rote, a bit programmatic – a strong woman in a man’s world, with just enough in the way of foibles to individualize her. We’ve seen this character before.

Which, ultimately, doesn’t diminish the pleasure of reading The Four Stages of Cruelty. The novel is original, compelling, and genuinely surprising.

 

Reviewer: Robert J. Wiersema

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, St. Martin's Press

DETAILS

Price: $29.99

Page Count: 304 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-31259-247-7

Released: Jan.

Issue Date: 2011-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels