Murder, he wrote

Michael Kimball's chilling, effective Mouth to Mouth

by Laura Kiritsy

Every family has at least one "crazy" relative -- you know, the one your mother defensively insisted was merely "eccentric" before dragging you off for his forced hugs and kisses. Unfortunately for the Chambers family -- Scott, Ellen, and their daughter Moreen -- the "crazy" relative really is crazy. And pissed off. And he's just arrived unannounced for a family reunion.

Neal Chambers, the son of Scott's brother Jonathan, turns up in rural Destin, Maine, in the midst of Moreen's disastrous wedding to the sleazy Randy Cross. An abusive wannabe thug who gets his jollies working over a loan-shark's delinquent payees, Randy, who also loves turning local teenyboppers on to heroin, is hardly Ellen's first choice for a son-in-law.

Initially unrecognizable to his long-lost relatives who last knew him when he was a precocious (read: very disturbed) little devil all of 12 years old, Neal, now a big and handsome devil, sweeps Ellen off her feet with a whispered promise that it is possible to get away with murdering her low-life son-in-law. Though not up for murder at that point, Ellen, a schoolteacher and struggling sheep farmer with a stale marriage and an alienated, pregnant daughter, welcomes Neal back into the flock. But the bodies start surfacing soon after.

If it sounds too good to be true it usually is, says Dear Abby, and Neal has more than a barn-raising on his devious mind. See, he's toting some serious baggage over a scandalous family tragedy that occurred on his 12th birthday. Arriving home from school during a hurricane, Neal anticipates cake and ice cream. Instead, he finds his mother in hysterics (his father had stormed out in a silent rage), and Aunt Ellen quietly suggests Neal go play outside in the storm. Needless to say, the birthday party's canceled and Neal spends his next 12 years plotting revenge.

So goes Auburn native Michael Kimball's third novel, Mouth to Mouth, a tightly written and expertly paced psychological thriller that will have you gasping for breath as desperately as Neal Chambers's unfortunate victims. Having mastered the suspense/crime thriller with his 1996 novel Undone (a London Times' bestseller), Kimball (who appears on March 11 at Tatnuck) is confident enough to give away, in the first few pages of Mouth to Mouth, that Neal is a disturbed creep, thereby setting the reader on edge from the get-go. Like any good dysfunctional family member, Ellen is in denial about the signal, despite the protests of her outspoken psychotherapist friend, Maddy. Kimball, who now lives in York, Maine, likens his style to the allure of a roller coaster: "You know exactly what it's going to be. But you go for the rush. So I think it's really good to let the reader know what they're in for and create the anticipation."

Neal is the classic villain -- a charming, sexy, take-charge guy who's more than willing to lend a hand to a family in need. But underneath his Good Samaritan façade lurks the mind of a predator with a predisposition for vengeance. Says his prophetic grandma Thelma Chambers at one point, "When it comes to holding a grudge, I've never in my life seen anything like these Chambers men."

Kimball adds, "Then there's also the father, who was a Fundamentalist, a faith healer, and very impossible to please . . . unforgiving. So you've got him and the mother, who's just conscious of her social standing in town more than anything. So between whatever might be in the genes and the environment, he's off to a bad start. And [Neal's] also extremely intelligent and probably has a mind that never stops working."

Kimball takes this nature/nurture premise as far as it can go, using Neal's pathology to build the back-breaking tension that engulfs the story like a whirlpool, sucking in the reader as he coyly lets the plot spill out. Like any budding sociopath, Neal zeroes in on his victims' weaknesses like the wild coyotes that eviscerate Ellen's stray sheep. Slowly and cunningly he draws Ellen, Scott, Moreen, and just about every other townie into his murderous plot, setting them up to do his bidding and making them the unwitting perpetrators in their own destruction. Preying upon Ellen's vulnerability and the entire family's inability to forgive one another and themselves for their past transgressions, Neal creates even more secrets among them. The theme of revenge versus forgiveness is what gives life to Mouth to Mouth, and not surprisingly Neal is the least forgiving of them all. Fond of cryptically quoting fire and brimstone Bible passages ("For committing adultery, `they shall both of them die.' Deuteronomy twenty-two."), Neal, it's obvious, sees as his role model the rigid and wrathful God of the Old Testament.

But for a guy so intent on meting out justice (however demented) and making everybody fess up the family secrets, he has a damn funny way of showing it. Neal's recipe for murder, which to chilling effect we learn he has been practicing for years, is to deprive his victims of oxygen, ensuring they suffer the most horrific, protracted deaths. As Mouth to Mouth twists and turns toward its climactic last gasp, Kimball brilliantly works the reader into a heart-stopping frenzy with his dead-on depictions of the denial that inhabits the mind of a victim thrashing about for a life-giving breath of air.

Witness the drowning of Gator, a henchman trespassing on Ellen's farm in search of missing money. When Neal snags Gator under the darkened pond water with a tuna hook and a pulley, lashing him tightly to a dam, Gator instinctively, yet pathetically struggles to break for the surface, while the reader is forced to watch in horror as "he felt the water dancing past his knuckles on its way over the dam. He reached higher, he dug his fingers into the concrete, watching his bright green hands through the Nite Sites as if they belonged to someone else, someone groping for life. He felt air on his fingernails and thought wildly that air on his fingers was enough. Then he saw another flash behind his eyes, an expanding, blinding orb and his mind gave over to extinct. He opened his mouth and let the water fall in. It felt so cool and light at first, like bright summer wind. With great relief, he breathed it in." Oxygen tank, anyone?

Like Mouth to Mouth, Kimball's crime thriller Undone also focuses on death by asphyxiation. Equally chilling is that book's description of a man who plots with his wife to fake his own death and realizes too late -- while he's entombed six feet under, and quickly running out of oxygen -- that his loving wife has double-crossed him. With the exception of its equally suspenseful and looping plot devices, the novels diverge there thematically. Unlike the Mouth to Mouth characters, who are crippled by their inability to forgive, Undone's Iris forgives, a kindness that effectively heals and frees her. A friend of Kimball's criticized the act as inconsistent with Iris's character. Though Kimball disagreed, he was compelled to explore the repercussions of a situation where no one was capable of forgiveness. And he wound up with Mouth to Mouth.

Probably more shocking than the way Kimball kills off his characters, is the manner in which he stumbled onto his career as a published author. In 1985, Kimball published his first novel, Firewater Pond, a comic tale about a wacky bunch of misfits who inhabit a rundown Maine campground. Kimball had a little help from that other genius of horror and suspense, Stephen King. A former music teacher and Yankee writer, Kimball penned the original draft in just six weeks. "I thought, jeez, if I could write a novel I wouldn't have to do any research," he recollects. "I don't know how stupid people get all the breaks I've gotten." As luck would have it, Kimball's wife, Glenna, was hit by a Maine Highway Department flatbed trailer carting a bunch of lawnmowers (fortunately she was not seriously injured). The settlement was just enough for Kimball to purchase a word processor on which he typed and polished Firewater Pond, shipping a copy to King, accompanied by an article he wrote for The Co-Evolution Quarterly (now known as The Whole Earth Review) called "On Farting."

"They called me the world's leading non-medical authority on the subject," he laughs. "It was quite scholarly, it had these pictures, x-rays, and whatnot. He [King] called me, and he said `Oh I love this farting article, I'm gonna read your novel. I get a hundred of these a week, and I throw them all in the fire because I can't possibly read them. But yours I'm going to read.' He called back a couple of weeks later after reading a hundred pages and said, `If it continues this good I'm going to give it to my editor.' And he did. . . . I love Stephen King, I just love him to death."