Description:
Penzler Pick, April 2002: An exceptionally gripping opening sets the pace for this suspenseful and original thriller from northwest writer April Henry. For those readers old enough to remember the classic 1960s New Wave French film Weekend, it will be easy enough to picture in the mind's eye the panoramic landscape of a massive, chain reaction-induced highway traffic disaster. For others, Henry's vivid and nightmarish 14-page description is more than up to the task. In Learning to Fly, the pileup is triggered by a freak eastern Oregon dust storm. Nineteen-year-old heroine Free Meeker is headed home--though not exactly rushing--to tell her laid-back, nonjudgmental, aging hippie parents that she's pregnant. Even more unexpected than the horrific 52-car collision from which she's walked away is the fact that the next day, before she can contact her family, the newspaper reports her among the fatalities. "She didn't feel like a dead person--but she didn't feel real, either. Wearing only a borrowed muumuu, she was sitting cross-legged on a sagging double bed in a room at the Stay-A-While Motor Inn, three blocks from the hospital. During the night Free has gotten only snatches of sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw dead people, cars cartwheeling through the air, the orange bloom of fire. Over and over again, she has flinched awake, hearing the squeal of tearing metal and the terrible boom of impacts in her dreams." This set of circumstances is hardly enough to give Henry's plot the dense weight of dread it soon manifests. The body identified as Free's turns out to be that of a hitchhiking woman whose husband is a single-minded sadist-abuser who soon vengefully targets Free as his missing wife's rescuer. Moreover, the suitcase handed to Free by a suffering young man--he soon succumbs to his injuries--as she fled the scene of the disaster is revealed to contain nearly a million dollars that belongs to some impatient and unforgiving drug dealers. This is a substantially loaded deck, and Free's intuitively self-preserving ability (after all, she has another life to consider) to play her own hand in response is what makes the novel, Henry's fourth, such compulsive reading. A classic tale of an innocent on the lam, Learning to Fly has the kind of plot that would have made Hitchcock smile in evil anticipation of its cinematic possibilities. And it's the kind of story that makes A Simple Plan by comparison look... simple. --Otto Penzler
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