'When the beautiful young videographer offered to join his campaign, Senator Lee Rogers should've known better. But saying no would have taken a stronger man than Rogers, with his ailing wife and his robust libido. Enter Barton Brock, the senator's fixer. He's already gotten rid of one troublesome young woman -- how hard could this new one turn out to be?
'Pursued from Washington D.C. to the streets of Paris, 18-year-old Fanny Cours knows her reputation and budding career are on the line. But what she doesn't realize is that her life might be as well...'
Are Snakes Necessary? is the latest novel in the Hard Case Crime series, a series of crime thrillers that try to recreate the pulpy thrill of the 1950's, complete with beautifully painted, sometimes schlocky, covers. This new novel sees the legendary film director Brian De Palma, famous for films such as Carrie, Scarface, and Mission Impossible, in his debut as an author.
You only need to look at De Palma's filmography to see that he's no stranger to telling stories about gangsters, criminals, murder, and corruption; so a book about such things seems to be completely in his wheelhouse. However, if you're expecting a story that's as in your face as something like Scarface you might be a little disappointing, as Are Snakes Necessary? takes a much slower approach to storytelling.
The story follows Lee Rogers, a Senator that's running for re-election and needs to keep his public image squeaky clean. This is easier said than done as it turns out the 'moral, upstanding' senator is well known within his inner circle as something of a womaniser. As such, it's down to his right hand man, Barton Brock, to keep things running smoothly.
At the start of the book we get to see how Brock comes to work for Rogers, that he grabbed the senators attention when he tried to ruin his career whilst working for one of his opponents. Very early on its made clear to the readers that Brock, and Rogers, are despicable people, who have no qualms about hurting others if it gets them what they want; they completely destroy the life of one young woman, Elizabeth, and don't even seem to care about it.
During the course of the book we keep checking in on Elizabeth, seeing how her life changed thanks to Brock and Rogers. Through her we also get introduced to a boyfriend of hers, a budding young photographer. Both of these characters keep skirting the fringes of the story, to the point that you begin to question why so much time is given over to them, before the authors manage to weave them both into the conclusion of Brock and Rogers' stories in ways that were honestly quite surprising.
The main story, however, sees Rogers slowly begin to form an intense relationship with a teenage intern on his campaign. What starts off as a young woman wanting to prove her skills and worth as a documentary maker, quickly turns into her obsessive love for a man she really, really shouldn't be involved with.
This relationship is incredibly creepy, and feels uncomfortable throughout. Here's a man who is more than twice her age, knowingly seducing and manipulating a young girl to get her into bed. He promises her the world, knowing full well that he's never going to deliver, and as soon as he gets tired having sex with her he'll move on to someone else; all while his faithful wife is suffering through illness and disability.
Now, the thing that makes this worse, and this is a spoiler so skip to the next paragraph if you don't want things ruined, is that it turns out that Rogers is actually her father. This became obvious moments before the revelation, but it didn't stop it feeling awful when it happened. I'm not sure why the choice to have this was made, as neither person finds out the truth, but it pushed things a little too far on the gross factor for me. It was already bad enough that he was sleeping with someone young enough to be his daughter, they didn't actually have to make her his daughter.
Are Snakes Necessary? seemed to be a story about how powerful men can do whatever they want, how women tend to be at the mercy of their whims and if what they want destroys your whole life then that's just what's going to happen. We see this at the start of the book, but get to see their victim put their life back together, though the events have clearly damaged her and left her with severe mental and emotional trauma; but we also see this slowly over the rest of the book, watching a slow and steady destruction of a kind and caring young woman, with deadly consequences.
The book is really depressing because of this. It's billed as a thriller, but the thrills are too few and far between for it to feel much more than a sad story, and possibly a warning not to trust the rich and powerful, especially politicians.
Whilst the book does move at a pace thanks to the short and punchy sentences and quick chapters a lot of time is given over to establishing characters early on that by the time things start to move forward with the plot they happen very quickly. Characters seem to make big, sudden leaps in motivation and logic because we don't get to see their decision making like we did early on, and it becomes hard to know where they are mentally or what they think is going to happen when they do some pretty stupid things. It felt like the book could have done with being a bit longer so that we could have had more time towards the latter stages of the story.
As it is, the book feels like it was perhaps envisioned as a film first, maybe a script that had been re-purposed into a novel. As such we get these long character introductions, but little of substance to them later in the story. I couldn't help but feel that the book might have worked better as a film, as it's an experience that was definitely stronger in the first half.
That being said, I did read the thing in a single sitting, and it was incredibly easy to read. There was a desire to find out what happened next at the end of every chapter to the point where thinking 'just one more chapter before bed' ends up with you reading the whole book into the early hours of the morning. It might not be the most thrilling thriller I've ever read, but it was a reading experience that stood out as very different to what I'm normally used to, and it was great to see Brian De Palma dip his toes into the world of prose novels.
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