Spoilers!
I love a breathless reading experience. Quite literally, when I’m flipping pages and realize I haven’t taken a breath yet. Even better is when momentous action gives me the shivers in anticipation of what is to come. I had both experiences while reading Alex North’s 2019 horror book, The Whisper Man, an appropriately unnerving, but heartfelt, book on the eve of Halloween. North’s book is an ode to the power of love between a father-and-son, a love that persists even through the difficulties and the horrors.
Tom Kennedy is a widower (the wife died young of a heart attack), now raising 7-year-old Jake by himself, with all the uncertainties and insecurities that brings. Fatherhood, it’s a horror book of its own! But of course, within horror is beauty and love, too, it’s just, Tom is having difficulty grabbing on to those right now. After all, it’s only been a year since his wife, and Jake’s mother, died. He’s grieving. Jake’s grieving. They’re two ships passing unawares within the same house. Tom thinks a fresh start in Featherbank will help. It just so happens that Featherbank was and is the setting for a serial killer and a potential copycat. About 20 years ago, a serial killer named Frank Carter, nicknamed the titular “Whisper Man” by the media, abducted and killed five boys, with one of the bodies never found. That haunts the original Detective Inspector on the case, Pete. In the present day — two months prior to Tom and Jake moving to Featherbank — another child, Neil, goes missing. Detective Inspector Amanda is on the case, with Pete obviously brought in to help. After two months, Neil turns up dead. Worse still, the mother remembers that Neil relayed that someone was whispering to him at night. The Whisper Man is back. But the killer couldn’t have been Frank, who is behind bars. So, who was it?
What we know about Frank, other than him being a brutal, sociopathic serial killer without any remorse, is that he also, like many serial killers, had a family. A wife and son. When Frank killed the boys, he covered their heads with their own T-shirt. Why? Pete’s thinking is that Frank ultimately wanted to kill his own boy — because all boys are bastards, is what Frank would say — but that would cause legal jeopardy, so, each boy he did kill was a stand-in for the one he couldn’t. The additional significant items to know about Frank is that a.) he’s not going to reveal where Tony, the fifth victim, is buried and b.) he seems to run the prison, despite being a child-killer, largely owing to the lack of anything sexual about it and his size.
In my head, then, if I’m Pete and Amanda, as awful as this is, you gotta look at Frank’s son, right? Awful because casting aspersions on the son for the sins of the father is obviously unfair, and yet. Frank’s son would be about 27 years old. Old enough to be the killer. I think it’s worth crossing him off the list, at least! Pete and Amanda will get there.
What’s great about North’s book is that, yes, he shifts perspectives around, from Amanda to Pete to Tom to even the killer, but also, importantly, to Jake himself. The shifting around helps keep the propulsion of the book going, and certainly, the Jake perspectives allow even further emotional heft to be applied because you realize, obviously, that Jake is just a kid! For how difficult he appears to be from Tom’s perspective, or that of his teacher, he’s still only a kid seeing the world through the lens of a child. To be sure, kids glean and understand far more than adults would like to think so, and it’s intriguing (and heartbreaking at times) how they then have to filter what they’ve learned through something they can understand because they don’t yet have the language to make sense of it. In Jake’s case, he is the one who found his mother’s dead body after her heart attack. He can’t make sense of that. So, instead, he’s taken a picture of his mother when she was his age and made that his imaginary friend who repeatedly reminds him, “Be brave.” That is so sweet and lovely. That’s Jake’s coping mechanism, those who look askance at imaginary friends, be damned!
What is also great about North’s book is that he gets that little earworm sing-song rhyme in your head about the Whisper Man akin to Freddy Krueger:
If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.
If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.
If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.
If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.
And we know as the reader that the Whisper Man is coming for Jake; we just don’t know how. Enter Karen and a twist with Pete. But before I get to Karen, the single mom of another little boy at Jake’s school Tom has started talking to, I first need to address Norman Collins. He’s a creepy little true crime enthusiast to the point of not only collecting memorabilia, but seeking what for him is the most reverent possible experience: seeing Tony’s bones. Through another inmate in prison with Frank, enthusiasts, or experts, as Collins’ likes to call himself, can pay the previous tenant of Tom’s home to view this “box of bones.” Apparently that’s where Frank kept Tom. Norman starts creeping around when Tom moves in because he wants to see the bones again. Tom is rightly skeeved out about this stranger poking around his new home. Later at night, when someone seems to be trying to cajole Jake into opening the front door and Tom chases him off, Tom calls the police and Norman is promptly arrested. Not wanting to go down for Neil’s death, Norman owns up to paying to view Tony’s bones and even murdering the previous tenant who wasn’t “respectful” of said bones. During all this, we learn that Pete, who helped ferry Tom and Jake to a safe house for the time being, is Tom’s estranged father! What! Apparently, Pete, who is in his 60s or so, and a recovered alcoholic, was kicked out of Tom’s life when he was around Jake’s age. We’ll later learn that Pete had problems with his dad, too. Generational harm and bitter feelings across three different fathers’ experiences.
So, back to Karen, who Tom divulges all the above to, and lo and behold, she’s a journalist. But she’s an ethical person and won’t use anything he said for a story (that would surely make her career). She does, however, invite Tom to dinner. Her mom will babysit her son, and Tom, feeling better at this point about his dad, asks Pete to watch Jake. There’s your set-up, which was bold of North because I’m like, we know that this is the night where Jake will be abducted, but with not just any police officer, but Pete in the house, how?! The confrontation happens off the page, unfortunately, but Pete, who has been described as physically fit for his age, is surprised at the door by the copycat killer, is stabbed repeatedly, and Jake is abducted. Damn!
And yes, you can’t blame the son for the sins of the father, but when the son, Francis Jr., now going by George and who works as a teacher’s assistant at the school, begins committing sins of his own, you sure can! Francis’ motive? He thinks he can protect the boys better than their actual parents — a way to “atone” for his inability to protect the boys his father murdered. Mind you, the father didn’t just murder those boys, but he made Francis come and bear witness. Jesus. But of course, even after two months of supposedly taking “good care” of Neil, something snapped in Francis, and he killed Neil. The problem is, no boy can be “perfect,” so he must punish them by killing them. The same will happen to Jake, if Tom and Amanda can’t stop him in time.
To say it a third time, what’s great, and so refreshing, about North’s book, is how smart everyone working against the killer is for once. Amanda’s a good and capable cop, as is Pete, notwithstanding the inability to prevent Jake’s abduction, and Tom is smart, too. Yes, he’s self-incriminating about his own inattentiveness as a father, but it is his smarts and intuitiveness that ultimately connects the dots back to “George” at the school and Karen’s sleuthing that uncovers where Francis lives. Similarly, Jake is smart, too! He’s not to be underestimated because he’s a kid. Using his mother as his cheerleader to “be brave,” Jake does just that in a beautiful, heart-racing confluence of a climax. First, Tom is questioning “George” at the front door of the house, and almost ready to walk away having believed Francis’ act. But then, Jake is able to surmount his fear of going down a staircase — the same way he encountered his dead mother — to begin banging on the door. Tom knows! Tom and Francis struggle, with the latter stabbing Tom, but Tom is still able to overpower Francis long enough for Amanda and the posse to ride in and save Jake and arrest Francis. Unfortunately, Pete wasn’t so lucky, as he died from his stab wounds, but he died believing he’d received redemption and love from Tom, at least. Brutal for both Tom and Jake, who not only are still reeling from losing their wife and mother, respectively, but then (at least with Tom) have now lost a newly connected father and grandfather.
The book ends closing the loop on the detail that Frank has command of the prison. Even though you have to suspend your disbelief that they would allow father and son serial killers to be in the same prison together, Frank comes to Francis’ cell at night — where Francis actually thinks a beautiful reunion might happen? — and kills him. Before he does, Francis puts his shirt over his head. Oof.
What a remarkable, fast-paced but layered, book that dealt with love and horror in equal measure. I cared about everyone who had their perspectives shared (except for Francis, obviously) because North did a great job of allowing us into their heads and their earnestness to do the right thing even though it was difficult and challenging. As Tom liked to remind Jake, they still loved each even when they argued. You still like great characters even when they’re not perfect or always capable. That’s what Francis couldn’t understand in his demented, trauma-broken brain.
I can’t wait to read more of North’s work! And sheesh, it’s gotta be so thrilling to not only see your book adapted, but to feature a cast that includes Robert De Niro?! Dang! I look forward to seeing how they adapted the film, too.
