Psychopaths on the Warpath

 Never Saw Me Coming - Vera Kurian

If Vera Kurian is to be believed – and apparently, she has the proper training to make this statement – there’s about a 2 or 3 percent chance that whoever’s reading this right now is a psychopath. That’s not to say that you are, as popular fiction might have it, a serial killer. No, you’re merely antisocial and/or empathy-impaired and/or egotistical. Based on that description, 2 or 3 percent of the population seems rather low…

…but the main characters of Kurian’s debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, are pretty close to 100% psychopathic. That’s because they’re members of the seven college students enrolled in a study run by renowned psychologist Leonard Wyman; youngsters who’ve received full-boat rides to a DC-area college so he could study them in the wild. Well, actually, one’s faking it – a rather strange twist given that psychopaths usually fake being “normal.” Anyway, protagonist Chloe Sevre – 18, gorgeous, smart, psychopathic coed – is really there so she can murder Will Bachman. Truth be told, he kind of deserves it…

Before Chloe can enact her grand plan however, two members of the psychopath cohort turn up dead (gruesomely, in one case). Since no one, including the participants, is supposed to know who the seven are; it’s somewhat surprising that three of the surviving members suss each other out in the first few days. Convinced that one of their group is killing off the rest, the three embark on a hunt for the hunter.

Of course, Chloe still plans to murder Will.

It being the 21st Century and the characters being college students, the expected hijinks ensue. You can count on binge-drinking at frat parties, roofies, meaningless hook-ups, hacked Instagram accounts, malware, hacked webcams, stolen records, slut-shaming, revenge porn, fake IDs, suicide, bullying, and all the other tropes of college life for Gen Z. They even go to class and take notes occasionally. Even though all the characters are too young to drink (legally, anyway), the book is for some reason not classified as young adult. Huh.

Kurian’s narrative shifts back and forth between Chloe (told in first person) and a third-person narrator following her two companions (Andre and Charles). The three voices, though, are oddly similar even though they come from different backgrounds. Andre is Black, from a blue-collar DC family while Charles is the son of a fracking billionaire (why a fracking company owner lives in DC is beside the point); yet a reader would be hard-pressed to determine which is which from a random sample of dialog – and that’s even though one is a real psychopath and the other’s faking it. As mysteries go, the story is weak: there are few clues, not even the occasional red herring. All the “triumvirate” can do is try to identify the remaining two… but, sadly, there’s an “out-of-left-field” candidate who turns up at the eleventh hour; sort of a Lucifer ex machina, so to speak. Feh.

These people are all weird. We read books to lose ourselves in the story and find characters with whom we can identify, even envision befriending. Face facts: there’s no character in Never Saw Me Coming that I’d want to hang out with, even if I were their age. Then again, they’re probably all going to grow up to run for President some day.

Without a likeable character and without a decent mystery, I can’t recommend this: 2½ stars.

Summary:

Plus: Let me think about it.
Minus: Unlikeable characters, clunky writing, weak plot.
What they’re saying: Maybe this is a mystery only a psychopath could like. 

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