Panic Attack by Jason Starr review

The Nerd can admit when he’s wrong. I have voiced my apprehension regarding Jason Starr’s Panic Attack all over internetland for some time now, saying how I’m not excited for it because The Follower was too “mainstream thriller” for my impeccable, disgusting tastes. But I have read it now, dear reader, and sweet fucking christ does Panic Attack kick ass.

But first, a quick note on why I was less than thrilled for Panic Attack: The Follower, Starr’s last solo effort for Minotaur, felt like a misstep. It’s a stalker novel that’s actually quite good, but good for…you know…a stalker novel. It still had Starr’s great satire and amazingly doucherrific characters, but the ending devolves into something much more traditional and mainstream than what I’ve come to expect from Starr, one of my favorite authors working today. And then it got this big publicity push and even made it into massmarket paperbacks eventually and – ever the king of the fucking cynics – the Nerd thought that Starr was going to tone it down so he could keep on getting this same type of exposure (like I have any idea how the book business works or some shit).

Well, the Nerd is happy to say that Panic Attack is good news for the basement junkies and shit news for Patterson Pussies, because motherfucker goes for broke yet again. This shit is twisted in the best sense of the word, dear readers. Fuck me – it’s straight-up nasty.

The story opens with Adam Bloom, psychiatrist/husband/father/yuppie-supreme, defending his house against burglars with his handgun. One intruder dies (turns out that no, he wasn’t armed at all), the other flees, and suddenly Bloom is being called the Bernie Goetz of the 00′s by every news source in New York. To add to his very public troubles, the second man, the handsome Johnny Long, is still out there, and you better believe he wants some fucking payback for Bloom offing his pal…and dude’s idea of revenge is absolutely fucking diabolical.

So what always grabs me about Starr’s work is his attention to everyday details. Most of his novels are about very ordinary people who get into or do uncommonly bad things. Thing is, all of his characters are hugely flawed in often bitingly satiric ways. In Panic Attack Starr goes for the throat of all his characters. Adam is a psychiatrist who is more emotionally deluded than any of his patients. His wife Dana is having an affair with twenty-something idiot who works at her gym. Their daughter Marissa is hopelessly naive despite a six-figure college education. And self-styled Casanova Johnny Long – in addition to being, you know, an all-out fucking psychopath – is apparently terrible in bed.

But none of that shit means anything in a crime novel if there’s no tension, and Panic Attack has that shit in spades. The shifting third-person perspective allows for these constant little mysteries to keep popping up that won’t make any sense until you see the same event through another character’s eyes, the trick never failing to keep you engaged and in suspense. And then, in the home stretch when Long is really turning the screws on the Bloom family? Good luck putting this fucker down, dear reader.

And speaking of the end, let the Nerd reiterate that, unlike The Follower, Panic Attack had an ending was just as dark and no-holds-barred as the book deserved (as a Jason Fucking Starr novel deserves). Where I felt that The Follower had a finale that felt like a compromise, this time out I think we have the fucked-up ending that such a fucked-up book deserves, no fucking compromises in sight.

So if you felt the way the Nerd did after he read The Follower, then don’t make the same mistake as he, dear reader. Be assured that Jason Starr is still a scary motherfucker willing to go the distance. Panic Attack is more than fucking proof of that shit.