BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Havoc (Christopher Bollen, author)
Fiction, thriller, Egypt, hotel residents, cat and mouse gamesmanship, dark humor, octogenarian protagonist, child with attachment disorder, psychosis, manipulation, history of abuse
Havoc is a tale of dueling, likely psychotic, antiheroes. Maggie is an eighty-one year old woman on the run from authorities after the fallout of her last hotel stay, and Otto is a troubled eight year-old boy with deep attachment issues. Along with a colorful cast of characters, Maggie and Otto are marooned at the Royal Karnak Hotel in Luxor, Egypt at the height of Covid. There the two engage in a diabolical, darkly humorous, escalating game of cat and mouse. The casualties mount.
Years earlier, after the death of her beloved husband of 54 years, Peter, Maggie squirreled herself away in mourning in her Wisconsin home. Not long after, Maggie lost her adult daughter and travelled overseas, landing in several lesser known grand old hotels across Europe for extended stays. While in residence at these hotels, she was unable to restrain herself from meddling in the lives of hotel guests. She believed it was her calling to “liberate” unhappy people from what she perceived (on little or often incorrect information) to be fraught relationships; she orchestrated conflict everywhere and even fabricated and planted evidence to disrupt their lives. Her antics escalated at each successive hotel. In Belgium, a murder-suicide triggered by her interferences compelled her to flee in the middle of the night.
Because Covid had halted most travel around the world at that point, Maggie landed at the Royal Karnack Hotel in Luxor, Egypt, one of the few places permitting entry at the height of the epidemic. There Maggie meets her match in Otto. She wiggled her way into conversation and interaction with Otto’s mother, Tess, and determined that Tess would be her next mark–she would liberate Tess from what Maggie believed to be her abusive husband and dying marriage.
Otto is a lonely, disturbed but observant and clever boy. He catches Maggie in the act of planting incriminating evidence in the room of another guest, and he weaponizes his knowledge to blackmail her. Maggie is shocked by the audacity of the child. Fearing discovery, she acquiesces to some of his initial demands. But as Otto’s demands escalate, Maggie becomes enraged, and retaliates. The twosome’s increasingly harmful and risky one-upmanship spirals. Maggie defies Otto’s demand for a video game console and to intimidate him from further action, she stealthily unlatches the door of the aviary which houses Otto’s beloved cockatiels, allowing the resident hotel cat to slink in and devour the birds. She then attempts to rally other hotel regulars against Otto as the culprit. In return, Otto kills the cat, sneaks into Maggie’s room, steals and then burns the lock of Peter’s hair Maggie treasures. The vitriol in the emotional warfare ratchets up. Otto taunts Maggie. He hacks her facebook account disclosing her location in Egypt. He uncovers private details about Maggie’s veiled past and discloses them to other long-term hotel guests. In the ultimate assault to her ego, Otto usurps Maggie’s coveted role of hotel sunset bellringer.
An executive from her Belgium hotel appears at the Royal Karnack to oversee several of the kerfuffles triggered by Maggie and Otto’s antics. Maggie suspects the woman recognizes her from Belgium, despite her disguised appearance. Fearing imminent discovery, Maggie spirals into a frenzy. She begins to plot to injure, and then to kill Otto to keep her past and her misdeeds secret.
However, Maggie’s plot goes off the rails when an innocent hotel guest ends up dead. Chaos ensues. The novel races to its shocking conclusion ( not to be spoiled here.) Bollen’s ending causes the reader to question much of what came before. What was real? What was imagined? The basis for Maggie’s break from reality is revealed, explaining, in part, the origin of her compulsion to separate innocents from evildoers. Like the best psychological thrillers and antihero novels, the twist is both deeply satisfying and stunning at once, delivering an “aha” and an “oh my!” all at once.
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