FRIGHT

FRIGHT (1950) is the first book I've read by the legendary Cornell Woolrich. It won't be the last. In fact, as soon as I finished FRIGHT last night, I started reading BLACK ALIBI (1942 and the basis for the classic 1943 horror film THE LEOPARD MAN). So far, so good. I'll post a review when I finish it. 

But for now, FRIGHT.

 Wow. 

This book is permeated with a palpable sense of paranoia in every paragraph. Every page is soaked with doom. Bleak House may have been a novel by Charles Dickens but it's where Woolrich's characters live their lives of impending annihilation. 

FRIGHT is set in the New York City of 1915, an odd choice for a noir novel, but Woolrich makes the time period work to his advantage. Young Prescott Marshall, a successful Wall Street broker is scheduled to marry the love of his life, the incandescently beautiful Marjorie Worth. But a drunken night on the town finds Prescott saddled with a blackmailing vixen who will stop at nothing to bleed the young man dry. In a furious fit of anger, Prescott murders the woman, just hours before his wedding ceremony. 

Prescott and his bride immediately move from New York to a never-named city somewhere in the heartland. Prescott gets a job at less pay than he made in New York and things are going okay until a strange man shows up in Prescott's office. Prescott is convinced that the man is a detective from New York who is following Prescott's trail. Prescott's paranoia leads him to commit two murders before he and Marjorie return to New York where more lives are ended. 

Just when you think this is the bleakest, most depressing ending to a story you've ever read, Woolrich pulls his trump card from up his sleeve by delivering a sucker punch, never-saw-it-coming epilogue that pulls the rug out from everything. 

To say any thing more about the twists and turns that this brilliant novel takes would spoil the delight of discovering them for yourself. No spoilers here.

Read FRIGHT and prepare to be plunged into a nightmare world in which one bad deed leads to another, and another, and another. 

Highest recommendation.