"The Kind Worth Killing"

Peter Swanson is the author of two novels, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, and The Kind Worth Killing, available from William Morrow in the United States and Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom. His poems, stories and reviews have appeared in such journals as The Atlantic, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epoch, Measure, Notre Dame Review, Soundings East, and The Vocabula Review. He has won awards in poetry from The Lyric and Yankee Magazine, and is currently completing a sonnet sequence on all 53 of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. He lives with his wife and cat in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Swanson applied the Page 69 Test to The Kind Worth Killing and reported the following:

Flip open to Page 69 of The Kind Worth Killing and you can read the first page of Chapter 7. What will you find out? You'll find out there's a narrator named Ted, who is convinced that his wife is cheating on him. Even so, they are planning a trip to the coast of Maine, where they are building a second home. I would say that this one page is pretty indicative of the rest of the book. The central theme of trust and duplicity is right there on the page. There are many narrators in my novel, and none of them know everything, of course. So a lot of the book hinges on who has what information, and who doesn't.

Of course, looking at one page of the novel means that you might not realize that there are several narrative voices, and that Ted, central to page 69, might be only a bit player in the book at large. Notice I said "might be." He might also be the central role. You'll have to read more than one page to find out.

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My Book, The Movie: The Kind Worth Killing.

--Marshal Zeringue