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Review: Michael Lapointe keeps the reader guessing in The Creep

Michael Lapointe has crafted an intellectually ambitious yet relentlessly entertaining mystery, one that can be enjoyed for its literary skill as much as its plot twists.

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The Creep

Michael LaPointe | Random House Canada

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$16.95 | 304pp

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A captivating, cynical thriller unravels the dark secrets behind a supposed medical miracle.

“We have all the blood in the world.” This is the lead that hooks Whitney Chase — a talented young culture reporter yearning, in the aftermath of 9/11, to write something important. She stumbles on a career-making opportunity: a shadowy company called Rubicon Tech claims to have invented artificial blood, the “Holy Grail of medical science,” and Whitney has the chance to break the story.

LaPointe reveals up front that Whitney’s story ends in ruin: her investigation ended her career and destroyed her life. The pleasure of this dark, cunning thriller is understanding precisely how it happened, through LaPointe’s almost unbearably suspenseful prose.

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At the novel’s outset, Whitney is a corporate consultant with suicidal tendencies, reluctantly being interviewed by a fresh-faced journalist eager to hear about “the golden age” of prestigious print media. “I look at her phone,” thinks Whitney, “There would be room in there for everything, for the story I never wrote, the one I can never tell.”

Here’s the other thing we know about Whitney: she’s a liar, compelled to fabricate details that make her stories more exciting. She calls it “the creep, as if an unwelcome visitor was playing with my tongue.” With the instincts of a practised deceiver, she senses that Rubicon’s medical miracle is too good to be entirely true, and she begins to unravel the deceptive, dangerous nature of their experimental research.

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LaPointe’s writing is taut and precise, building inevitably toward horrifying revelations that would feel cheap or implausible in a flimsier novel. More than anything, the delicious blend of pulp, intricate plotting, and evocative prose reminded me of John LeCarre, the master of highbrow literary thrills.

But it’s also a spiritual successor to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, another tragic tale of a striver undone by their ambition, haunted by a secret that can never be shared. And like Tartt, LaPointe has crafted an intellectually ambitious yet relentlessly entertaining mystery, one that can be enjoyed for its literary skill as much as its plot twists.

Though we know how Whitney’s story ends, the machinations of her downfall are suspenseful and surprising. Her doomed investigation is rich enough to stand alone, but LaPointe maps it onto a rich, complex portrait of post-9/11 America, a jaded country on the brink of moral and economic collapse.

“It seems  ridiculous now that an entire industry could go so long believing people wanted facts,” Whitney thinks, “when in fact they crept, like me.”

A compulsively-readable novel that will grip you all the way to the chilling climax.

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