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eyrea's review
4.0
"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."
-- apocryphal, attributed to Margaret Atwood
Right in the first major character interaction, Helen Howell's novella sets up a question: what would you do if your intuition was screaming that a stranger is mortally dangerous to you, yet you don't have a single shred of physical, logical evidence to present to a third party to help you?
It's a question faced by thousands of people around the world, every day. The child notices that the older kids following him on the way to school aren't acting the way they usually do, and intuits he's going to get beat up that morning. The young man goes to a club with some friends and decides he doesn't like the "feel" of the place just before a fight breaks out. A woman accepts a ride from a friend of a friend, and realises as soon as the car starts moving that she's made a mistake.
I Know You Know follows the fate of Janice, a young woman who's inherited both her grandmother's house and her fortune-telling business. Janice's accuracy rate is almost perfect, and she receives a lot of recommendations. One of these leads to her encounter with Edgar Kipp -- a senior sales representative who both hates and is fascinated by fortune-tellers.
Janice realises from the results of her very first encounter with Kipp that he intends to kill her, but she only has what she has intuited -- no proof. The bulk of the story depicts the different twists and turns of fate and chance as Janice tries to find a way to escape Kipp, while Kipp arranges an opportunity to murder her.
The third-person narratives mostly switches between Janice's and Kipp's day-to-day lives. The insights into Kipp's past and motivations make him a frighteningly well-rounded villain, and a creepy example of logical thinking gone haywire. Janice's attempts to find sound logic for her own correct-but-unprovable conclusions are a deftly-executed illustration of someone who knows she is hunted, but also knows it will be nearly impossible for anyone in power to believe her. Howell does an excellent job of ramping up the tension from chapter to chapter -- as a reader, I felt like calling the police on Kipp myself!
The story has some significant supernatural aspects. I admired how they highlighted the central intuition/logic conflict, and how they put Kipp's motives into perspective. I wasn't so sure they should have been so prominent in the story's ending, but that may be because I already had a different ending imagined by the time I reached that part of the story. Certainly I was happy with how things turned out for all of the characters.
I read an ebook version of the novella, which came out to 84 pages on my phone's reader application. Maybe it's because one of the characters travels during the story, but I kept thinking it would be an excellent read for a train ride, or two halves of a long commute. Because the chapters flow so seamlessly into one another, and the suspense increases so steadily, it would be difficult to put down for long periods of time.
-- apocryphal, attributed to Margaret Atwood
Right in the first major character interaction, Helen Howell's novella sets up a question: what would you do if your intuition was screaming that a stranger is mortally dangerous to you, yet you don't have a single shred of physical, logical evidence to present to a third party to help you?
It's a question faced by thousands of people around the world, every day. The child notices that the older kids following him on the way to school aren't acting the way they usually do, and intuits he's going to get beat up that morning. The young man goes to a club with some friends and decides he doesn't like the "feel" of the place just before a fight breaks out. A woman accepts a ride from a friend of a friend, and realises as soon as the car starts moving that she's made a mistake.
I Know You Know follows the fate of Janice, a young woman who's inherited both her grandmother's house and her fortune-telling business. Janice's accuracy rate is almost perfect, and she receives a lot of recommendations. One of these leads to her encounter with Edgar Kipp -- a senior sales representative who both hates and is fascinated by fortune-tellers.
Janice realises from the results of her very first encounter with Kipp that he intends to kill her, but she only has what she has intuited -- no proof. The bulk of the story depicts the different twists and turns of fate and chance as Janice tries to find a way to escape Kipp, while Kipp arranges an opportunity to murder her.
The third-person narratives mostly switches between Janice's and Kipp's day-to-day lives. The insights into Kipp's past and motivations make him a frighteningly well-rounded villain, and a creepy example of logical thinking gone haywire. Janice's attempts to find sound logic for her own correct-but-unprovable conclusions are a deftly-executed illustration of someone who knows she is hunted, but also knows it will be nearly impossible for anyone in power to believe her. Howell does an excellent job of ramping up the tension from chapter to chapter -- as a reader, I felt like calling the police on Kipp myself!
The story has some significant supernatural aspects. I admired how they highlighted the central intuition/logic conflict, and how they put Kipp's motives into perspective. I wasn't so sure they should have been so prominent in the story's ending, but that may be because I already had a different ending imagined by the time I reached that part of the story. Certainly I was happy with how things turned out for all of the characters.
I read an ebook version of the novella, which came out to 84 pages on my phone's reader application. Maybe it's because one of the characters travels during the story, but I kept thinking it would be an excellent read for a train ride, or two halves of a long commute. Because the chapters flow so seamlessly into one another, and the suspense increases so steadily, it would be difficult to put down for long periods of time.
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