The Craft of Vengeance in Show Yourself by Shane Pollard

The morning after I finished reading Show Yourself by Shane Pollard, I heard the news that a 15-year-old girl had been dragged from a bus stop and raped in the woods less than a mile from my house. Too apt for a book that starts with a strange man chasing an 11-year-old down an alley, and I’ll admit that this intrusion of reality colored how I remember Show Yourself.

Danger Lurks

Child of the 1980s, the idea that there’s a stranger lurking in the bushes is very familiar to me. Crime stats be damned, the way our human brains assess risk (there’s an excellent Hidden Brain on this) means I carry this fear whenever I go anywhere. The visceral way Pollard captures Jenavieve’s situation in the opening pages of Show Yourself tells me I’m not alone. The craft behind this is precise, from using strong verbs (cowering) to details (“rusted dumpster, amongst the dirty runoff and the smell of wet asphalt”) just specific enough to convey an ugly, if not unfamiliar, environment without drawing attention away from the action.

I’m not spoiling anything by saying the stranger ends up (physically) harming Jenavieve’s father instead of her, reflexively stabbing James to death as James tries to protect his little girl. Here Pollard amps up the poignancy (and the omnipresence of danger) by flashing back and forth between what must have happened in the alley and the merry group of friends Jenavieve and James had been part of immediately before.

All this in the first three pages.

Point of View Affects Everything

So far I’ve written about Jenavieve and James, but the book is not really about either of them. The book is about the narrator, Tristan, James’ friend and Jenavieve’s “uncle.” Pollard very clearly structures the book this way, using not just Tristan’s first-person point of view, but also going so far as to start the book with the word “My.” It’s a valid choice, and the events of the book would unfold very differently if he had chosen a different POV character (11-year-olds might feel a lot of agency in the world, but their effectiveness is limited by societal constraints). Regardless of whether Pollard had chosen third person or third, he was going to have to stick close to Tristan to investigate the nature of vengeance.

The one flaw in this is that sometimes Jenavieve gets lost on the story. Maybe it’s because I’m a mom or because the news keeps newsing, I wanted more of what was happening with the girl: how was she coping? who was actually caring for her? is she waking up in the middle of the night wondering what would have happened if? Some of these questions are answered obliquely (Tristan takes custody, she spends many nights with Mike and his family—the rest of their party from that fateful night). And Mike and Kristen (Mike’s wife) do remind Tristan from time to time that he’s responsible to Jenavieve’s actual wellbeing, not just for avenging her father. But the effect of centering the narrative on Tristan is that the story can be as blind to the real victim as he is.

Revenge?

The tagline for this book is, “This is not a revenge story.” Which is an interesting choice for a book about one man’s obsession with retribution. But maybe that’s because the story does also become about how Tristan himself gets lost inside his quest. He lets his obligations to Jenavieve slide, fails to maintain his business, and sometimes (accidentally) creates situations where he could be mistaken for the kind of creeper he’s trying to rid the world of. It affects his friendships, too, as he tries to recruit Mike but Mike refuses to set aside his whole life for this one purpose.

Still, Tristan drive and actions push the plot forward and the action revolves around tracking down the perp to make him pay. The action is swift and fast-paced, even when Tristan is stymied in his search, which makes the book a fast read.

Literary Thriller

Don’t read too fast, though, because (as I described earlier), this book is finely crafted. The relationships between characters flow naturally (with more than one character offering a chance to challenge Tristan’s view of them), events unfold in unpredictable (but not unbelievable) ways, and the sentences are spare without being terse.

Show Yourself is the best kind of thriller—the book you reach for because you just want to lose yourself in a more just world for a few hours but also a book that ends up stretching your thinking along the way.

Closer to home, they caught the guy who assaulted the little girl in my neighborhood. I don’t know who or how she is, but I can only hope that she is surrounded by people who love her as fiercely as James, Tristan, Mike, and Kristen loved Jenavieve in this book.