October List

October List – by Jeffery Deaver

A book like none other I’ve read.  This story starts at the end and ends at the beginning. This is a book that tells the story in reverse order. Ridiculous, you say?  Well, not really. If you think about it, it’s not completely foreign to tell some stories “out of order”. We’ve all seen movies that start with a prologue, and then the next scene says something like “Four Years Earlier” and we see what leads up to where we were when we saw the first scene.  We also have movies like “Pulp Fiction” that seem to be told completely out of sequence, yet, since it’s such a well-done movie, it still resonate strongly for many people.

To be fair, this really isn’t that great of a story. The appeal, though, is how it’s told. This type of experiment isn’t for everyone. I can see where a lot of people would be turned off, and it can require a tad more concentration when the whole story is going backwards.  Deaver, smartly, knows his limitations. He purposely made this tale significantly shorter than an average book for him, because he knows that too much detail in a case like this will simply baffle most of the readers.  There’s only so much ‘backwards’ one can take before screaming at the ride operator to stop the spinning so we can get off before we become sick.

Also, in case you’re wondering something like “How do you enjoy a story when you already know the ending as soon as you start the book?”  Well, see, that’s the beauty here.  You know the ‘what’, but you don’t know the ‘why’ or the ‘how’. This is where Deaver’s skills come into play.  His best niche is his ability to twist his stories (several times in some books) so that nothing is ever what it seems when you get to the last few chapters. He does a good job near the end of this book (which is actually ‘the beginning’) to tidy up the loose ends so you can make sense of what happened at the beginning of the book (which is actually ‘the end’).

Still, though, I’m betting most readers, like myself, went back and read the end/beginning after we read the beginning/end just to make sure we got everything.  This book is definitely an interesting and unique twist. I’m not sure if I could handle many more like this, though. Once is good. I’m now ready to go back to a normal sequential story.