Reviews with content warning for Drug abuse - The Fury

A gripping, exhilarating, and at turns deeply suspenseful story that was difficult to put down whenever I began a session of reading it. This is my first time reading Michaelides, after being recommended another of his books, The Silent Patient. Having now read The Fury, specifically the last ninety-odd pages in a dizzying haze of twists, accusations, revenge, and sickening realization, I can confidently say that I look forward to reading Michaelides' previous works, as well as whatever he writes next.

The conceit of this book very much, at turns, reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with the first-person retrospective of a narrator telling us their increasingly twisted, increasingly murderous, tale. Like Tartt's Richard Papen, Elliott Chase is a manufactured man of sorts, a desperate outsider to a world of privilege (here, Hollywood and the London theater scene, in TSH an elite group of students) and insularity that the desperate, painfully lonely child within the narrator seeks to become a part of at any cost.

Where the books diverge is the sheer number of twists, and the sheer Machiavellian ways that Elliott Chase, as The Fury continues, twists from semi-sympathetic narrator, gathering the reader to a story, to villain as the realization hits that he

orchestrated faking his best friend and near-lover Lana's murder to be with her

. That Elliott

does not succeed, but is instead foiled by Lana's having found out his plan, found it disturbing, and decided to betray him from the outset in her own form of justice, her own betrayal, and chooses to take back her life from every man who's ever orchestrated it,

is a brilliant climax.

As much as Elliott tells us he loves Lana, it's clear that his own attitude, his own belief that the others in his life he can orchestrate to make them love him, because he believes it will end in love, is folly of the utmost, a quest for self-fulfillment in a way that made me, as a reader, question everyone he says he loves. Of course, some of his affections felt genuine, but how much was this always about Lana herself? How much, in the end, as he describes himself having

murdered her out of potent rage, out of fury, yet still seeing her in his mind as the woman on the big movie screen while he sits, glowing, in front of it as a child,

was it always about having fallen in love with the image he wanted of a woman who loved him?

Elliott's near-fatal mistake is believing that he, like the novel itself, like the structure of it, holds all the power: that the people in his life are characters whom he can control. When he tries, in his own narration, to want to "interrupt them—to say, No, no, you're not meant to be saying that and This shouldn't be happening. But it was happening," he all too late realizes the sheer unpredictability of others, and in turn the sheer unpredictability of himself, embodied by the furious island winds into murdering the woman he thought he'd loved in cold, furious blood.

Needless to say, this was a gripping, disturbing, and deeply fascinating read that will doubtlessly offer a fruitful future reread which, despite my discomfort with Elliott as a narrator (the further you go, the less likeable he is), will likely propel me to return again, knowing all the twists, to see the eventual tragic ending. Like a good play, I have a feeling you could read this book more than once, see it more than once, and pick up something new each time.

Content Warnings