Title: Calvin’s Head
Author: David Swatling
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Length: 264 Pages
Category: Psychological Thriller
CW: graphic violence and harm/cruelty to animals
At a Glance: Jason Dekker is a paradoxical protagonist, a sympathetic, if not conventionally principled, character. I enjoyed this trip into the mind of a serial killer with some serious identity issues.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Life in Amsterdam isn’t all windmills and tulips when you’re homeless.
Jason Dekker lives in a jeep with his dog, Calvin, on the outskirts of the city. A thesis on Van Gogh brought him to the Netherlands, and the love of Dutch artist Willy Hart convinced him to stay. But Willy is gone and Dekker is on the brink of a total meltdown. On a summer morning in the park, Calvin sniffs out the victim of a grisly murder. Dekker sees the opportunity for a risky strategy that might solve their problems.
Unfortunately, it puts them directly in the sights of the calculating stone-cold killer, Gadget. Their paths are destined to collide, but nothing goes according to plan when they end up together in an attic sex-dungeon. Identities shift and events careen out of control, much to the bewilderment of one ever-watchful canine.
Oscar Wilde wrote that “each man kills the thing he loves”. He didn’t mean it literally.
Or did he?
Review: David Swatling’s Calvin’s Head is a solid psychological thriller that telegraphs the old adages ‘a leopard doesn’t change its spots’ and ‘a scorpion can’t change its nature.’ Told from three equally essential points of view, the idea that one should be wary of a man who doesn’t like dogs is also part and parcel to the story, as is always trusting a dog’s instincts. One of the POV characters is, in fact, Calvin, Jason Dekker’s loyal Golden Retriever. Calvin is, without question, the most intelligent and endearing character in the book.
Swatling opens his novel in true mystery fashion with the killer in full performative mode, murdering an as-yet-unidentified man. It’s Calvin who introduces the rather gruesome solution to the victim’s identity as well as to Dekker’s homelessness problem when the playful canine retrieves a garbage bag from a lake at the park. A bag that happens to contain a severed head…with a face that Dekker recognizes. This sets into motion some conundrums of the moral gray area variety that beg the question, where does the line blur between innocent acts of desperation and flat-out unjustifiable criminality? Dekker knows the victim but rather than inform the police of his identity, he uses it to his advantage, which makes him an antihero rather than a true villain; though, that line distorts even further when he has the unfortunate opportunity to meet Gadget, the psychopath who means to eliminate both Dekker and Calvin.
As Dekker’s sophistry leads him to assume a new identity as well as taking on the role of caretaker, in an unexpected twist, his stranglehold on control of his life—or at least the life he’s assumed—becomes ever more tenuous. The addition of a parrot called Bastard to his entourage offers brief moments of comedic relief among the tension of how, and if, he and Calvin will survive the mess in which they’ve become embroiled as they make their way from Amsterdam to the south of France in a bid for anonymity. The rising conflict reaches the boiling point back in Amsterdam, though, and once again Calvin plays a pivotal role in the action. The final challenge to our beliefs in what is, or is not, morally justifiable ends the story, and is not an issue that’s answered by the author but is, instead, left up to the reader to decide.
Jason Dekker is a paradoxical protagonist, a sympathetic, if not conventionally principled, character. His backstory, and where those circumstances left him—needs must and desperate times call for desperate measures, considered—leave him in a neutral zone between all good and all bad. I enjoyed this trip into the mind of a serial killer with some serious identity issues.
You can buy Calvin’s Head here:
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