Some thrillers chill even when the outcome’s obvious – you know who’s targeted, by whom, and why. What author Mark Rubinstein knows how to do well, however, is keep the tension high about when. In Season of Fear, his latest crime novel, he creates a suspenseful narrative with his skill as an experienced psychiatrist and author. He’s so good at describing panic and fright in excruciating physical and psychological detail that these effects become the main focus of the novel, over cause of the fear. Along the way, he also manages to inject concern about anti-anxiety medications and having guns.
The tension in the novel begins when Dr. John Randall, a psychiatrist, and his lawyer wife Ellen find themselves being stalked and increasingly step up pills and alcohol to cope. What else to do when threats keep rising and the police are unable to do anything without incontrovertible evidence? How to live naturally when your life is suddenly upended by a madman on the loose? In fact, two madmen.
It’s November 2020. Charles Davis, a deranged psychotic, the former animal control officer for Bridgeport, has just escaped from a locked cell at Yale Psychiatric Hospital and seeks to kill all the dogs and cats in town and anyone who would stop him. That includes Dr. Randall because he had been called in to do a fitness-for-duty psychiatric evaluation of the 28-year-old schizophrenic who believes that John is at the head of a conspiracy with the animals to take over the city. Then there’s Ed Gannon, a police officer, whose case John has recently agreed to review, a huge hulk of a man with the features and build of a brawling NFL lineman --“gnarled knuckles,” “fists the size of lunch boxes.” And a nasty attitude. He knows the routine, he’s clever, defensive, menacing. He wants a desk job with the police. No way he’s going to get it, which he senses. Slowly, ominous events occur -- hang-up calls: the road death of an associate of John, strange meetings in stores, bloodied rats in the Randalls’ bedroom. The memories become like “loathsome parasites that have taken up rent-free residence in [Ellen’s] brain.” That’s what fear and dire expectations do, John knows, “they distort your perceptions.” And panic sets in.
Rubinstein knows the law and the limits to which people can count on the courts or police if their suspicions have grounds, but proof is circumstantial. Can’t a stranger suddenly eat or shop where you do? Take the same elevator? Idle a car at the curb outside your house? Travel on the same parkway? Even confront your seven-year-old daughter and tell her she’s pretty, and he’d he’d like to have someone like her? One of the disturbing features of Season of Fear has to do with having a gun for self-protection. John reluctantly decides it’s necessary and gets a pistol from his neighbor, a Vietnam vet who teaches him how to shoot. The nice-guy neighbor is a beekeeper and tells John what bees do to protect their queen.
In retrospect, the book’s two epigraphs suggest how the nightmare will conclude. The first is from Pliny the Elder --“the only certainty is that nothing is certain.” The second is from playwright David Mamet: “A good thriller must have an ending that’s inevitable but predictable.”
