Raw Dog Screaming Press, 232 pages, hardcover, $29.95
Sometimes you see the news and hear about someone doing something absolutely awful, like murdering a stranger or threatening his own children. What is the thought process that leads one to act this way? How do these fractured minds work? Is there any sense behind the actions of a madman? Matthew Warner’s wonderful, powerful ,and devastating novel Eyes Everywhere makes an attempt at answering questions like this and showing us how a paranoid mind works (or fails to do so).
Charlie Fields lives in the DC- area, performing a dull job at a law office. He struggles with a wife and two young kids. There are always bills, noises from the neighbors, pollution, the mindless chit-chat that can fill up a marriage, and arguments about money and about finding a better place to live — the typical working- and middle-class hell of worries, that one day you will be out of a job, homeless, with no family and no dignity. These are the ideas always weighing on Charlie’s mind. Add to that a stressful job situation and the post-9/11 paranoia, and the result is a breeding ground for paranoid schizophrenia.
When we meet him, Charlie has already started to go insane, and a series of random incidents has driven him over the edge. And the root of all his family problems is a wealthy family friend, Philip Duke, who is leading the Gestapo and all its agents against Charlie to get to his family. Soon, Charlie is on the run, broke, living in a rundown hotel, and trying to be a superhero who can use his superpowers to stop crime, save his family, and expose the conspiracy.
As Charlie falls into madness at an ever-accelerating rate, his ideas become completely nonsensical — his desperate plan involves stealing the kids away from their mother and confronting Philip Duke. The conclusion is intense, heartbreaking, and incredibly painful to watch. No matter how horrible his actions are to his family, we know that Charlie at least thinks he is saving them. The book’s climax is an exciting, terrifying, unpredictable series of actions that leave the reader devastated, as to both Charlie’s mental deterioration and the hell it puts his family through.
The book manages to be funny as well. Charlie’s odd way of thinking and his actions and relations are so strange as to take on comic book proportions. But the humor never detracts from the tragedy at the heart of this story.
As a study in paranoid schizophrenia, this is as good as it gets. Warner really understands the psychotic mind and puts us right inside it, always leaving enough doubt that we can’t be sure if there really is a conspiracy. This is an incredible, moving, tragic tale of a man and the events that lead him from being a normal family man into an armed and dangerous predator on the loose. We never learn “why” Charlie does what he does, but we can get close to an understanding, as Warner makes sure to always remind us Charlie is a person too, capable of pain, fear, embarrassment, humiliation and more; and that poor Charlie is an inherently good person, looking out for the safety of his small children.
For an incredible read and a masterful portrait of a psychotic mind, look no further than Eyes Everywhere.