Maniac
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
None of us signed up for Transfiguration.
Is she … healing?
Could this ass-backwards non-therapy be working?
Eventually, they dont seem to be speaking past another anymore.
Theyre connected, sisters again.
And no matter how many hawks swoop in yelling Annie Im coming for you!
scenes like these secure the deep humanity ofManiac.
This is it, Ellie says, now fully herself, This is the place where I died.
Paranoia slips like a liquid into every available crack and crevice in Owens mind.
The next sequences are such a fast-paced churning of events that I began to feel a bit queasy.
I mean Jed Grimsson (get it?
Hes been undercover for 36 years, he says, and hes there to spirit Jed away!
Or maybe its Owens way of providing his own brain with an exit from a fate hell never inhabit.
And then, he turns into a hawk.
while soaring over majestic landscapes like some sort of Nature Channel special.
That scene so unexpected made the novel.
It proved that Grossman was willing to overstep the invisible but taut lines keeping fiction in check.
InManiacthe product is far campier, but it fulfills the same role.
But Annie ignores Ellies sage advice to say good-bye, and hops in the queens pickup.
And roll out that periwinkle coffin, its calming.
Was the entire plotline contrived just so it could end … like this?
Remember the story of Jeds childhood gerbil, eaten up by a hawk that Owen rescued from the park?
Hes simultaneously reliving his most tender moments and his most heroic.
