When we first meet Luke, he is a 6-year-old boy playing on a New York City playground, where he’s just befriended another little boy named Daniel. The story is told through Daniel’s narrative, so it takes a while to realize there is something not quite right about Daniel; it takes longer to come to the same realization about Luke. “In This Way I Was Saved” is a debut novel about a young man struggling to come of age without his absentee father, who ran off to start another family after he realized he couldn’t deal with Luke’s mother’s mental illness. Luke’s mother Claire runs a family-owned publishing company. She took over after her own mother, who also struggled with mental illness, ended her own life. Luke’s mother often locks herself in her bedroom for weeks on end, emerging as if nothing has happened, leaving young Luke to fend for himself. Daniel often takes care of Luke during these episodes. In telling this story, Daniel eventually realizes he is not a real person, yet he yearns to gain control over Luke’s actions and thoughts. Early on in their friendship, Daniel talks Luke into killing their family puppy. After Claire finds the corpse and Luke tells her that Daniel is at fault, Claire recognizes something in this behavior and rushes Luke to a psychiatrist. After regular sessions with his doctor, Luke is able to banish Daniel for many years. However, during one of Claire’s particularly bad episodes when Luke is 18-years-old, Daniel comes back into the forefront, and Luke takes him off to college with him. Luke struggles to contain Daniel’s behavior throughout many new endeavors in college. He finds it difficult to make friends, and he knows Daniel will always be there for him. He allows Daniel to stay with him, yet tries to stave off the evil that emanates from Daniel. Finding it to be a losing battle, Luke gives in to some of Daniel’s ongoing commentary; just enough for something truly terrible to happen. Just enough for Luke to rush back to the city to talk to his former psychiatrist to try to find out how Daniel emerged and how to get rid of Daniel forever. An interesting story, told from an interesting point of view, this keeps you guessing until the end on how things will turn out. Foreshadowing allows that no good will come of this story, however the reader pulls for Luke nonetheless. This is the work of a new writer with serious talent and shows a lot of promise as a debut novel. The descriptions and dialogue throughout were impressive, as was the creepy factor. The narrator, a mysteriously formless being of some kind with a consciousness, has a great voice and a consistently dark personality. The plot itself tended to be lacking in true tension and direction though. This became more and more evident as the sequence of events took place and became most evident in the end, as the conclusion of the book left a lot of my questions unanswered. Not in the enigmatic, "well, some things just aren't meant to be resolved" sense, but in a "what the hell is this thing ending here for?" sense. One of the major characters, Luke, was not fully developed and never materialized as more than an almost obligatory afterthought of a secondary presence. Luke's mother, Claire, also left a bit to be desired as there were times when her character seemed to be one of the central pieces to the story, then she would virtually disappear from the plot altogether. Her psychological make-up and how it impacted Luke was well introduced through a couple of pretty intense scenes early, but it was never realized to its full potential.Again, Brian Deleeuw seems to have "it" as a writer and knows how to intrigue and creep out the reader quite well. He writes in a direct but very descriptive manner, painting extremely clear pictures in the reader's mind. This story had a lot of promise and a great premise, but kind of deflated en route to an abandoned puzzle of an ending.
What do You think about In This Way I Was Saved (2009)?
Oh my gosh! I could not put this down--intriguing, strange, a must read!
—dav
