The Minus Man - Hardcover

McCreary, Lew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670834149 ISBN 13: 9780670834143

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1991

Synopsis

An unsettling portrait of Vann Siegert, a quiet, fastidious part-time postal worker, journeys inside the mind of a serial killer whose grudge against humanity is transformed into lethal drinks that he shares with strangers

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A daringly placid novel about--here goes--a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans--postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen--takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices--flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail--press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

It is an eerie, rueful tale Vann Siegert tells in McCreary's ( Mount's Mistake ) startling second novel. After a cross-country move from his native Oregon to a small Massachusetts town called Bledsoe, Vann is soon looking for employment, a place to live and victims. Vann is a serial killer who poisons hitchhikers from a flask of Southern Comfort laced with lethal sedgwort. "Go ahead and help yourself" are the last words these unsuspecting riders hear. In Bledsoe, Vann finds temporary work in the post office and victims aplenty. What sets this work apart from the usual serial-killer saga is the tone. In an uninflected but quietly impassioned voice, Vann relates the murders and bits and pieces of his own dark history--his mother, for instance, used to tie him to a chair in the cellar when he was a boy. Painfully self-aware and clearly suffering, Vann is a troubled, memorable character.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0670834149
• ISBN 13: 9780670834143
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256