Back to the beginning
'Kill Your Darlings' a clever feat of 'structural magnificence'

“Kill Your Darlings,” by easygoing Peter Swanson, wasn’t my pick for this month’s Murder Ink. I had requested from Blackstone Publishing of Ashland, Ore., the March 2025 publication of “Hang on St. Christopher,” the latest Sean Duffy police procedural of the battle in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles by legendary crime writer Adrian McKinty. 

Then I espied a mention of a 2024 novel that somehow slipped by me by Icelandic Ragnar Jónasson, the putative heir to the virtuosic yet recently quiescent Arnaldur Indriõason. I read both of these sensational books one after the other, unable to choose between them and figuring I would offer them both in this month’s “Murder Ink.”

Then I picked up Swanson’s “Kill Your Darlings,” a handy 270-page book to read for myself and knew right away that I had to share this offbeat and fascinating story. I still can’t believe I would choose this eccentric allegory in place of the heavy-hitting dramas I lost sleep reading and herewith highly recommend you seek out.

With Swanson’s “Kill Your Darlings,” we have a book by a seasoned crime writer. Judging by his book titles, casual character sketches and easy-going prose, he doesn’t appear terribly concerned about competing for book sales with the overachievers or crafting his paragraphs for easy adaption to the screen. 

Swanson builds this book from back to front. It begins in 2023 and moves backward to 1982, when Wendy Eastman was boarding a bus for a three-day eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C. Wendy was a reader, almost forced into reading by having already moved three times with her struggling family. She was the first to board the bus, careful to choose a seat in the center which would provide the best odds of sitting alone. The in-crowd noisily filled up the front and back of the bus as she figured, and the raucous boys scattered throughout the middle seats as she’d guess they would. Then, young Thom Graves came running clumsily across the parking lot banging his knees into his suitcase a moment before the bus driver was about to pull away and blundered into the seat next to Wendy.

Thom went from a serious disappointment to someone of interest when he took out his book. He inched toward being a friend as they discussed the intricacies of Stephen King, “The Exorcist,” “Friday the 13th” and other plot developments and secret meanings in books and films unthought of by most 13-year-olds. They soon went to holding hands and starting a lifelong friendship by the second of three days together.

We then move to 1984, when the standout feature is their pledge to love each other for the rest of their lives. They steal away into the woods with a blanket and no knowledge of condoms. Wendy becomes pregnant, consequences ensue, and they part for what appears to be forever. Thom goes onto university to be a writer, and Wendy ships off to Aunt Andi’s cabin in New Hampshire to give birth then give away her unwanted baby to a Catholic charity. She reads books by the sea and begins writing poetry and only occasionally skips a heartbeat for a distant and lost Thom Graves.

Swanson’s story of Wendy and Thom progresses to 1991, when the two coincidentally wind up at an Aspiring Writers Program at Kokosing College, in Ohio, and literally meet across a crowded room. Wendy’s name tag on the sign-in table announced Wendy Barrington, giving Thom pause to think of his first and only love, but he dismissed the jolt when this Wendy was from Lubbock, Texas. With his blood pressure returning to normal, Thom made eye contact with a beautiful woman across the crowded room, and both knew fate would thenceforth fill the holes each had in their hearts since 10th grade.

We spend some time in 1991 as these two connive time together and more in 1992, when Wendy’s rich husband, Brice, falls into their swimming pool in Lubbock and drowns on one of his habitual, inebriated evening strolls. Wendy is conspicuously in the Berkshires at the exclusive Tinhook Literary Festival at the time of this unfortunate accident, while Thom is staying in the next town over in a dilapidated inn beginning the day after Brice’s misstep into the deep end of his pool.

“Kill Your Darlings” begins at the end in 2023. Thom and Wendy, now wealthy thanks to Brice Barrington, have been married for decades. He teaches literature at a third-tier college, drinks too much, flirts with every skirt that will fall for his eighth-grade charm and gets lucky with some. And Wendy pushes him down the grand staircase one night. 

Ask Maria’s Bookshop for their generous 15% discount for “Murder Ink” books and buy this respectfully short 270-page hardback. Danya Kukafka, author of the bestselling “Notes on an Execution,” blurbs that it is a, “feat of structural magnificence – the instant I turned the final page, I flipped straight back to the start to put it all together again. Exhilarating and exceptionally clever … zings with a singular sense of tension.”