… not quickly. But once it gets going, boy howdy.
CW: animal death, sexual abuse
Christopher Bollen’s Havoc is narrated by octogenarian widow Maggie Burkhardt, who has taken up more or less permanent residence in a once grand, now kind of rundown hotel in Luxor, Egypt at the height of the COVID pandemic. Maggie is the self-appointed grande dame of the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel: she knows all of the other guests and has ingratiated herself with the staff, especially the kindly concierge Ahmed, who allows Maggie to ring the bell throughout the halls, nightly summoning all guests to view the magnificent sunset over the ancient ruins.
If you enjoy unreliable narrators, then Bollen has crafted a doozy for you. Maggie is wonderfully (or terribly) self-aggrandizing, constantly scheming to meddle in–she would say “improve”–her fellow guests’ lives. She uses her age as armor; who would suspect an old lady from Wisconsin of bad behavior? However, the arrival of a mother and son to the Royal Karnak sets up a battle for the ages. Maggie finds that she has met her match in the eight-year-old Otto.
Havoc is under 250 pages, and it isn’t until about 20% of the novel has transpired that Maggie and Otto really begin to go to war. While their rivalry begins innocently enough, with Otto usurping Maggie’s position as bellringer, it indeed escalates rapidly. I’m talking dead animals, physical violence, emotional abuse, and murder. This is decidedly not a lighthearted prank war.
Through Otto and Maggie’s war of attrition, Bollen reveals just how unstable his narrator is as she becomes increasingly unhinged. Bollen evokes Shakespeare as Maggie’s deteriorating state of mind is matched by her physical infirmity; Lady Macbeth-like, she develops bruise-like spots all over her body as her paranoia about Otto grips her reality.
The ending of Havoc mirrors its narrator’s complete loss of control; I had to reread the last few chapters a second time to answer “WTF was that?” I’m not sure Bollen sticks the landing as the ending includes some revelations that may have been more effective if they had been better alluded to earlier in the novel. (If you read Havoc, I’m talking specifically about Chapter 37.) But I enjoyed the ride and the utter darkness of this story.
