She Treads Softly: They Never Learn

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

They Never Learn

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo
10/13/20; 352 pages
Gallery/Scout Press

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo is a highly recommended revenge thriller.

Scarlett Clark is an English professor at Gorman University. Her other "job" is eliminating men who assault and rape women. The university system tends to ignore or excuse sexual assaults on campus and the professors who prey on young women. Scarlett doesn't. Every year she selects a man at Gorman who deserves to die for their actions and she meticulously plans out their murder. She has made every kill look like an accident or suicide and no one has been the wiser that she has targeted them for murder. Her last kill, a star football player, has drawn unwanted attention to that murder as well as past deaths on campus. Now the psychology department chair Dr. Mina Pierce is looking for patterns in all the deaths.

Alternate chapters follow reserved freshman student Carly Schiller and her confident, outgoing roommate Allison Hadley. When Allison is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly becomes obsessed with exposing the guilty man and seeking revenge after the medical clinic and the university don't take the claim seriously.

It is important to note that this isn't a novel about justice; it is a novel about revenge and a serial killer. And Scarlett may be seeking vigilante justice in her mind, but she is actually a sociopath and feels no guilt or compunction over her actions. She has no soul searching doubts about murdering her chosen victims. Now, if you can go with that, it is an entertaining, fast-paced novel with some twists (that you may see coming) and it will hold your attention to the end. It is a feminist novel taking on the campus rape culture by embracing a theme of revenge. The novel is set up as good versus bad, with all the males predatory and the females innocent. (While that can be the case sometimes, personally I believe that justice often can and does occur with the legal system.) Characters aren't all as well developed as I would like, but they are interesting.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.