Road to ruin

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/06/2024 (828 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The question isn’t whether regressively ignorant parents would ever try to ban Linwood Barclay’s brilliant I Will Ruin You — it’s whether teachers would be so traumatically terrorized that they wouldn’t even open the book.

It’s a scary place inside Toronto author Barclay’s head, especially if you’re our sometime-narrator Richard, an English lit high school teacher in Connecticut, and his wife Bonnie, an elementary school principal.

The gates of hell open to swallow up Richard, all because he saved a whole lot of children and their teachers from death and dismemberment.

As our tale opens, Richard is teaching Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. It’s students who are supposed to be gazing out the window, not the teacher, but Richard spots a young man he vaguely recognizes as a former student approaching a school door while wearing a suicide vest.

Launching a school-wide lockdown at the top of his lungs while running to that door, Richard gets there just as the student enters, hand clutching a triggering device.

The bomber names three people — a nasty incel teacher who puts everybody down, a guidance counsellor and someone known only as “lawnmower man” — he wants brought to a room. Everyone else may leave the school.

Richard convinces the young man to go outside, but the plot isn’t into peaceful outcomes and, well, there soon isn’t much left of the young man.

Injured, Richard is treated as a hero.

Like that’s going to last long when you’re a character in a Linwood Barclay murder mystery.

The dead man’s parents reckon Richard talked him into blowing himself up, and they sue.

That nasty teacher on the list? He’s furious Richard told the police that the bomber had targeted him, and he quietly and quickly organizes a pack of parents eager to ban The Road and any other book they haven’t read that they find objectionable, with obvious doomsday implications for Richard’s teaching career.

Meanwhile, Barclay introduces us to another former student. He’s a loser who’s got a low-level job positioning him to help fentanyl dealers get their shipments from a Mexican cartel. When a shipment comes up short, the fentanyl dealers — well, Barclay will fill you in.

The former student needs money fast, and there’s Richard all over the news. This guy had been on the wrestling team, and Richard occasionally filled in as extracurricular supervisor for a teacher-coach who later killed himself. Bottom line, the guy wants $10,000 in cash from Richard or he’ll tell the cops he’s got repressed memories surfacing of Richard’s sexually assaulting him.

Richard says it never happened. Would a first-person narrator in a murder mystery ever lie? Well, OK, besides all those examples your book club members are citing.

Meanwhile, did we mention that Richard’s wife Bonnie has a police detective sister on the trail of those fentanyl dealers?

Also, did we mention that back when Richard confronted the bomber, that his buddy the principal was lining up the young man for a clear shot? Yes, the principal is packing.

Richard reckons he can’t stand up to the blackmailer because he’s already survived one brush with the end of his teaching career and a trip to prison when — no, no spoilers, but you know it’s a murder mystery rule that every character is hiding scandalous secrets.

Everything is spinning completely out of control, and both Richard and Bonnie are doing really stupid things that compound the already-idiotic decisions they’ve made.

You’ll practically be diving into the pages screaming at Richard that he’s creating an evidence trail, leaving prints and DNA — what will the police think when they see his browsing history and his call record, and why did he let nosy neighbours see him, and why on earth would he ask the all-knowing and all-powerful school secretary about a former student?

Oh dear.

Linwood Barclay does this all superbly: Hitchcock-type stuff for a new century, an innocent man caught up in a web and looking guiltier by the minute.

Of course, we only have Richard’s word for it that he’s innocent.

Barclay is so good. Any teachers who dare to read I Will Ruin You will lie awake all night, fearing they’ll be Richard by period three.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin is so old that he went to school when the teachers were in charge.