In “Only If You’re Lucky,” Female Friendships Prove Anything But Fortunate https://ift.tt/4apM7vr
With Stacy Willingham’s latest novel, Only If You’re Lucky, her third foray into psychological suspense in as many years, she establishes that luck had nothing to do with the instant bestseller status of her freshman and sophomore efforts, A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things. Her newest work, a dark, twisty exploration of female friendship, college debauchery, obsession, and murder (lots of murder) hits every note anticipated by loyal fans of the genre (of which, full disclosure, I count myself one).
There’s the unreliable narrator with tragedy and secrets in their past and just enough substance abuse and mental health issues to get foggy when it comes time to account for the statistically improbable number of violent deaths to which they’re adjacent. In this case, that’s Margot, a withdrawn, rising sophomore at a small South Carolina college reeling with grief (guilt?) over the accidental death (murder?) of her charismatic (abusive?) childhood best friend, Eliza, the summer they graduated high school. We meet Margot freshman year, hiding out in her dorm room, watching bad movies, popping pills, and yearning for a connection to replace her lost friendship (obsession?).
That kinship shows up in the form of Lucy Sharpe: the queen bee of the dorm, a magnetic party girl who sweeps Margot away from her equally sad-sack roommate to live in a group house in back of a fraternity. Lucy fills perfectly the next most important role in a psychological suspense: the too-good-to-be-true ally with their own (always hidden) agenda, their own collection of dark secrets, their own inexplicable hold on the narrator. Of course, Margot latches on, hoping to come to recreate what she had with Eliza in all its dysfunctional glory and all its opportunity for violent ends.
At one point, one of Margot’s new housemates warns that Lucy is apt to turn Margot into “something I’m not. She’ll twist me and mold me until I’m unrecognizable, transforming in her hands like soft, wet clay.”
Margot is not opposed: “That’s all I’ve ever wanted, really. For someone to scoop me up and tell me what I’m supposed to be. […] I want Lucy to bend me, break me. Rip me to pieces and reassemble me into something different, better. New.”
The third element no psychological suspense novel should be without is an appropriately creepy setting. On this front, Willingham leans hard into Southern Gothic with her sweltering Carolina college campus and the decrepit fraternity annex — all ripped sofas, beer stains, creaky floors, and broken locks — into which Margot moves with Lucy and her two roommates. Best of all though, is the shed that serves as a shortcut from Margot’s house to the frat, a place for the Southern bros to dry their own tobacco and hang freshly killed game. In case the reader misses the mood setting that goes on there, Margot clarifies: “I reach up and touch [a hanging tobacco leaf], its sticky consistency making me think of a spoiling corpse: juicy and putrefied…There’s just something about it that makes me uneasy: the ropes and the leaves hanging from the ceiling, obscuring my view, like someone could come up behind me and I’d never even know it.”
The deft use of a fractured timeline, another hallmark of the well-made thriller, allows this disturbing description to show up early in the book. Only If You’re Lucky starts at the end of the story with a police investigation into Lucy’s disappearance after the death of Eliza’s boyfriend, Levi, now a member of the frat next-door and responsible, according to Margot, for Eliza’s death. Chapters bounce between this “after” and a “before” that covers Margot’s summer and fall in the house with Lucy and their two roommates — the parties, conflicts, the reveals that precede Levi’s murder. Throughout it all, Margot grapples in increasing detail with her own part in the last night of Eliza’s life a year before.
By the end of the novel, Willingham has tied it all together in a completely satisfying conclusion. It’s a conclusion that surprises (it would be surprising if it didn’t) and surprises again, and then maybe one more time, as Willingham delivers twist after twist, every one unexpected, plausible, and clever. She’s created a narrator who is telling far less than she knows but does so in a way that there’s never a feeling of being duped or cheated. That feat alone should earn Willingham a place alongside Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn in the pantheon of great psychological thriller authors.
While no true fan of the genre will be disappointed with Only If You’re Lucky, it’s not Willingham’s best. It takes about half the novel for the mysteries to start to unfurl and the promise of the frat-owned, blood-soaked abattoir and smoking room to come to fruition. Willingham spends many pages exploring the intimacy and intensity of childhood and college female friendships. Eliza and Margot; Margot and Lucy; Margot and Lucy and their two roommates. The word “tangle” pops up anytime these characters are reclining on the same couch or gossiping in the same bedroom. Willingham does manage to capture some of the ride-or-die nature of the friendships between females on the brink of adulthood, but frankly, that’s not what we come to a Stacy Willingham novel to read.
The second half of the book gets back on track and then some. By the end, I found myself glad I stuck it out, because I got everything I look for in a work of psychological suspense: The twisty ending that keeps me up turning pages late into the night, the thrill of the next horror popping out from behind the next door (and the next and the next and the next), the unsettling feeling of sympathizing with deeply flawed characters and their skewed moral codes — not liking them but rooting for them anyway. That’s what keeps me coming back to this genre, and it’s what Willingham ultimately delivers in Only If You’re Lucky.
FICTION Only If You’re Lucky By Stacey Willingham
Minotaur Books
Published January 16, 2024
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