The Only Child / Andrew Pyper

3.5 stars out of 5

As a forensic psychiatrist at New York’s leading institution of its kind, Dr. Lily Dominick has evaluated the mental states of some of the country’s most dangerous psychotics. But the strangely compelling client she interviewed today—a man with no name, accused of the most twisted crime—struck her as somehow different from the others, despite the two impossible claims he made.

First, that he is more than two hundred years old and personally inspired Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker in creating the three novels of the nineteenth century that define the monstrous in the modern imagination. Second, that he’s Lily’s father. To discover the truth—behind her client, her mother’s death, herself—Dr. Dominick must embark on a journey that will threaten her career, her sanity, and ultimately her life.

I read this to fill the “Genre: Horror” square on my 2017 Halloween Bingo card.

I really quite enjoyed this offering from Andrew Pyper and no one was more surprised than me when I was able to read it without my usual fearful quivering. (His book The Damned scared the crap out of me!)

There was definitely a sense of creeping dread throughout the first half of the book, as the reader is piecing together the details. Lily, our protagonist, at first seems to keep her wits about her. I understand her desire to know who her patient is and what relation he has to her life, but by the second half, I couldn’t completely understand her actions. But, as I have written before, I am a chicken who would have been in hiding (and would never have had a job like Lily’s interviewing the worst of the worst psychotic criminals).

What I did love were his sidelines into Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Dracula. I’ve read all three of these classics and I thought Pyper used their details well in this novel.

The ending, I suppose, was inevitable. It did leave me wondering if Pyper was leaving himself some room to write a sequel somewhere down the road.