“The Interloper” by Antoine Wilson

If you like smart, dark fiction, race out and get “The Interloper” by Antoine Wilson immediately. A man struggles to deal with his wife’s sorrow after her brother is brutally murdered.

The book tells the story of his imaginative attempt to seek revenge upon the jailed killer, a quixotic attempt to restore his wife’s happiness which ends up taking over Owen’s life.

Wilson has a genius for dialogue. His characters all speak in their own voices, even the dead brother who leaves a frat-boy journal behind.

Here’s our unusual hero:

My name is Owen Patterson. I am thirty-eight years old. I am in fine shape medically and psychologically. I have been checked out on both counts. Despite my being far away from her, and my not having talked to her for several months now, I remain married to Patricia Patterson. We have no children. I consider myself a civilized person, probably around 80% acclimated to the society in which I lived, if not more. A solid B. I miss working for the software company. Life had a nice routine to it. Software manuals are pleasingly logical when written right, and we used to write them right. If I could wake up from this bad dream, I would wake up in my cubicle at the software company, face creased from the edge of a binder, and ask mouth-breathing Neil, in the next cubicle over, if he wanted to get some coffee downstairs.

Wilson is such a gifted writer that it is hard to believe that this is his first novel. It’s even harder to understand why this book went straight to paperback, since it’s easily better than 99% of the hardbacks out this past summer.

Famous novelists T.S. Boyle and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), as well as the New Yorker, gave this book rave reviews. The Drunken Housewife concurs; I’m sure I’ll re-read this book, and I’ll be excited to see more work from Antoine Wilson.

Written by The Drunken Housewife, who is currently raising two children in San Francisco after a decade of practicing law. She amuses herself by writing on her website, Drunken Housewife and writes about food at The Drunken Housewife Cooks.