<p> Is he like some of those warped-minded Japanese men with a fetish for female underwear, she wonders. But that is also ruled out. <br /><br />Andrea Maria Schenkel never resolves the mystery. Instead, she builds a profile of a psycho. His father had built the bunker as an air-raid shelter.<br /><br /> At least that was the spin he put on it. A drunkard and wife-beater, he had driven her to the edge of life. He would lock her up in a mill for days on end despite her screams and pleas for mercy. At last she had hanged herself in the mill.<br /><br />The son who was to turn a monster, stabs his father who had misbehaved with him after being sozzled. They save the man after an emergency operation but lock up the assailant-son.<br /><br />As a boy his father had gifted him a rabbit on his birthday. “They don’t get on my nerves, they nestle against you, all soft and warm,” he remembers. <br /><br />The cuddlesome days are numbered. The old man skins the poor creature alive: a moment’s twitching and then it hangs limp and still. The boy watches it all.<br /><br />Schenkel does not use this to make her protagonist a killer. He just abducts a woman and dumps her in the bunker.<br /><br />There are just about four or five characters here, none of them meaty enough. No tension is built up, nor are we treated to any spine-chilling stuff. <br /><br />The plight of a fly takes up almost two pages. “The fat fly is crawling over the table. Goes a little way, stops, goes on, stops again, cleans itself, moves on. Its proboscis gropes over the top of the table until it finds a breadcrumb.”<br /><br />It is in the same situation as the prisoner herself. Both are shut up in the same room. Is it the human condition that Schenkel is trying to portray? The fly as a metaphor?<br /><br />Woven into this tale of abduction and just one killing towards the end, is an operation theatre. What snatches of surgery have to do with the bigger picture remain a mystery. And that’s the only twist in this drab tale.<br /><br />There are also instances when reality, dreams and nightmares keep slipping in and out. Is it a mind game being played out, or is there real drama in the depths of a place where the sense of time is lost in all-encircling darkness? The only chill factor is the cold of the concrete the abducted woman feels.<br /><br />For those used to page-turners there is hardly anything that is engrossing. It may be a genre of crime fiction, but it misses the cut.<br /><br />Give us any day, a fat tome with twists, turns, atmospherics and characters whom we can relate to.</p>
<p> Is he like some of those warped-minded Japanese men with a fetish for female underwear, she wonders. But that is also ruled out. <br /><br />Andrea Maria Schenkel never resolves the mystery. Instead, she builds a profile of a psycho. His father had built the bunker as an air-raid shelter.<br /><br /> At least that was the spin he put on it. A drunkard and wife-beater, he had driven her to the edge of life. He would lock her up in a mill for days on end despite her screams and pleas for mercy. At last she had hanged herself in the mill.<br /><br />The son who was to turn a monster, stabs his father who had misbehaved with him after being sozzled. They save the man after an emergency operation but lock up the assailant-son.<br /><br />As a boy his father had gifted him a rabbit on his birthday. “They don’t get on my nerves, they nestle against you, all soft and warm,” he remembers. <br /><br />The cuddlesome days are numbered. The old man skins the poor creature alive: a moment’s twitching and then it hangs limp and still. The boy watches it all.<br /><br />Schenkel does not use this to make her protagonist a killer. He just abducts a woman and dumps her in the bunker.<br /><br />There are just about four or five characters here, none of them meaty enough. No tension is built up, nor are we treated to any spine-chilling stuff. <br /><br />The plight of a fly takes up almost two pages. “The fat fly is crawling over the table. Goes a little way, stops, goes on, stops again, cleans itself, moves on. Its proboscis gropes over the top of the table until it finds a breadcrumb.”<br /><br />It is in the same situation as the prisoner herself. Both are shut up in the same room. Is it the human condition that Schenkel is trying to portray? The fly as a metaphor?<br /><br />Woven into this tale of abduction and just one killing towards the end, is an operation theatre. What snatches of surgery have to do with the bigger picture remain a mystery. And that’s the only twist in this drab tale.<br /><br />There are also instances when reality, dreams and nightmares keep slipping in and out. Is it a mind game being played out, or is there real drama in the depths of a place where the sense of time is lost in all-encircling darkness? The only chill factor is the cold of the concrete the abducted woman feels.<br /><br />For those used to page-turners there is hardly anything that is engrossing. It may be a genre of crime fiction, but it misses the cut.<br /><br />Give us any day, a fat tome with twists, turns, atmospherics and characters whom we can relate to.</p>
