Pen & Ink Reviews

Peter Swanson’s Her Every Fear is a harrowing psychological thriller that takes the reader to an elegant apartment building in Boston and into the twisted labyrinth of the human mind. Chilling and tense with a highly focused setting, the story has a hair-raising plot with a cast of perverse characters and a brilliant Hitchcockian tone. It is one of those books that could be held up as a defining entry in its genre. The story has the claustrophobic air of a locked-room mystery paired with the breathless tension of a psychological thriller. There is an edge of domestic noir to this tale with the taut setting of the apartment building, the linchpin of several female characters, and the moral ambiguity of the narrators.

The tale’s narrators are nuanced, twisted, depraved, and incredibly normal. I love an authentically unreliable narrator, and Mr. Swanson excels at creating such characters. His characters are utterly human, completely fallible, and all the more memorable for it. Kate, who is the least objectionable character, is tormented by her own anxieties and riddled with self-doubt, living in the shadow of a previous trauma. Alan and Corbin skate the line of moral ambiguity: Alan is obsessive and watchful; Corbin is haunted by his past and struggling to redeem himself. And Henry is terrifying and disturbing, his actions and thought-process making one’s skin crawl. Mr. Swanson does a stellar job exploring the range of these psyches and creating believable, multi-faceted characters.

This is a character-driven story and well-paced, though it is not a tale that is driven by action. The storytelling is active in style, but it is an introspective, harrowing journey through the labyrinth of the mind—one crippled by anxiety, another haunted by past crimes and alliances, another twisted and warped by an aberrant, disturbing nature. The author employs a looping method in his writing: leaving the reader on a cliff-hanger with one character at a chapter’s end to loop back with another narrator. This formula works well for the author, building tension and providing glimpses of the other narrators through different eyes.

I have come across few authors in the genre who write so intellectually and vividly, and Mr. Swanson has secured his place on my must-read list. Grippingly suspenseful and disturbing, Her Every Fear is an unsettling exploration of questionable sanity, voyeurism, and murder set within the tight confines of an upscale apartment with as many doorways as there are secrets.