Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Dan Chain SHAWN, author of Ill Will, published in March by Ballantine.

Dan’s other works include the short story collection Stay Awake, the best seller Await Your Reply and Among The Missing a finalist for the National Book Award. Dan’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Dan teaches at Oberlin.

Ill Will is a book that if you go by all the reviews will scare the hell out of you. And after having read it, I would agree with a minor caveat. I didn’t feel like locking the doors, or worry that the creak on the tread was an intruder come to abduct and do terrible things to me. No I was more nervous about myself. What was I going to to? The book forces you to question some of your own preconceptions about the construct that you find yourself in. You know, the personality that you created for yourself a long time ago. If you don’t watch out the book can create slight chinks in the armor that you have hammered to make your live more livable, more normal. And these are things that are really scary. Because you can lock your doors, you can fight off an intruder or call the police but you can’t tell your self to change real quick or to ignore warnings that may have at once been on the horizon but are now approaching in a storm, sails billowing and flags flying.

In Ill Will, our protagonist is Dustin Tillman. He’s been through a lot but he has handled it with less than aplomb. Maybe he could have done things differently. He’s consumed with grief, uncertain of his place in the universe, estranged from his sons, caught in a web of murder and possible deceit and looking for a way to make things make sense (when that is what he is supposed to be doing for others) all while his universe emits this cosmic afterglow of ill will.

Writing this introduction has even made me a little nervous. So with that welcome Dan and thanks so much for joining us today.