Lippman takes aim at horror

Dream Girl Laura Lippman Morrow

Years ago, I interviewed Mary Higgins Clark, onstage. Near the end, Clark asked the audience: “If you were alone in an isolated house on a dark and stormy night, what’s the most frightening sound you might hear? The crowd began shouting: “A scream!” “Footsteps!” Clark said: “The sound of a toilet flushing.”

Therein lay Clark’s genius. She recognized the everyday turned eerie was far more unsettling than any threat from the outer limits of experience.

In Dream Girl, Laura Lippman shows a shrewd appreciation for the mundane turned macabre.

Dream Girl, Lippman’s latest stand-alone suspense novel, is set in a fictional luxury penthouse apartment in Baltimore, Lippman’s hometown and the site of most of her novels. A cranky novelist, Gerry Andersen, ensconced in a swanky setting, rails at the idiocies of the contemporary world. As Lippman robustly imagines him, Literary-lion-in-winter Gerry owes something to Philip Roth (as well as his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman). There’s the brilliance, the devastating humour, the complicated sexual history with women, and the fraught relationship with his mother.

But, a more explicit literary presence here is that of Stephen King, as Dream Girl swiftly morphs into Nightmare. At the end of the first chapter, Gerry stumbles over the rowing machine in his bedroom, skids to the edge of the “floating staircase” that connects the floors of this “topsy-turvy” duplex, “windmilling” down the steps, landing at the bottom “a crooked broken thing.” There he lies alone until his young assistant, Victoria, arrives in the morning.

For months, Gerry will be imprisoned in that windwhipped, isolated penthouse, his only constant visitors Victoria and a dull night nurse named Aileen. During that time, Gerry will be tormented by letters (that mysteriously disappear) and dead-of-night phone calls from a woman who claims to be the real-life heroine whose story Gerry appropriated for his breakthrough novel, also called Dream Girl. Whenever the phone rings, Aileen, the night nurse, claims she doesn’t hear it. In his medicated state Gerry can barely think straight. Is he imagining this harassment? Think Stephen King’s Misery starring Zuckerman, um, Bound.

In a moment sure to tickle fans of Lippman’s long-running Tess Monaghan series, Gerry tries to hire the journalist turned private detective for surveillance to monitor those phone calls he thinks he’s receiving. Tess turns up at Gerry’s place and ultimately turns down the job. As she explains in a conversation, the reason is the penthouse itself, which gives her “the creeps.”

Socially conscious and packed with humour, (#Metoo puts in a memorable appearance along with ghosts and narrative turns of the screw) Lippman’s Dream Girl is indeed a dream of a novel for suspense lovers and fans of literary satire alike.