The Problem with The Storm King Was It Ended


            There’s wisdom in starting your book off with a bang, in grabbing your reader, from the jump. Brendan Duffy does just that in The Storm King, as his first chapter, set in an Adirondack town named Greystone Lake sees a car fall off a cliff into treacherous water, with a family of four, including the book’s main character Nate, inside.

            Young Nate survives, but his parents and brother don’t. After cheating death, Nate spends his youth with his grandma in Greystone Lake, and in his teens channels the rage that formed from his early loss into his high school persona of The Storm King. Nate The Storm King spends his high school years exacting revenge on anyone who does him or his friends wrong.

            We learn of the clever, sometimes violent, and often deliciously satisfying acts of the Storm King in flashbacks, because it’s been 14 years since the Storm King graduated high school, and he has returned to Greystone Lake. Now a successful surgeon, husband and father in New York, Nate has come home for a funeral of an old friend and flame Lucy, whose body has recently been discovered, and to reckon with his past bad acts.

            Duffy gives enough of his characters complicated back stories and motives for killing Lucy that as old friends weave in and out of the pages, the reader believes any one of them could have done it. When the murderer is revealed, it makes as much sense as would have a handful of other reveals. The ability to write from so many places of possibility makes Duffy’s writing special.

            Duffy also evokes feelings of mystery, regret, and rage through his descriptions of the town, and the hurricane that batters it on the occasion of Nate’s return. Nate’s youthful rage returns during his trip home and mimics the passing storm, and is sublimated by the discovery of Lucy’s murderer and the unspooling of his past, until finally his internal storm passes just as the hurricane does.  

The Storm King stays on a reader’s mind from the beginning. Duffy wraps up his story nicely, but by then readers want to know what’s next for Nate, his friends, and the other characters who inhabit Greystone Lake.

Thank you to Victoria Lamothe for suggesting The Storm King. This is my second read this year as recommended by Victoria, after The Book of Strange New Things. She has not steered me wrong yet.  

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