cover image THE KING'S EVIL

THE KING'S EVIL

Will Heinrich, . . Scribner, $23 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-3504-4

Brooding and suspenseful, this debut novel about a solitary man who commits an impulsive act of charity with frightening consequences asks provocative questions about the nature of good and evil. Narrator Joseph Malderoyce knew passion only in his youth, when he vowed to be a painter, but that ambition was erased when an exhibition of Mondrians left him in hopeless awe. After working as a lawyer for many years, he resigns from his firm and moves to a remote rural village "in the far north"; his main activity is studying tuberculosis, the disease that took both his parents' lives. Joseph's quiet existence is abruptly altered when he discovers a strange teenager, Abel Rufous, asleep on his back porch. The boy has been beaten, and Joseph invites him in, sympathetically offering him a room and assistance. Abel is surly and uncooperative, and when Joseph introduces him to his friends—Diana Greene, an attractive single woman, and Dr. Ericksson, an African-American who is the town's sole physician—he is rude and insulting; soon he becomes violent. As Abel's inherent evil becomes too obvious to ignore, Joseph decides to act. He is aware of an 18th-century expression, "the King's Evil," referring to tuberculosis, which suggested that the king, by his touch, could relieve a patient's symptoms. Joseph thinks he must perform a similar feat and restore his world to its normal parameters. While the narrative initially has a gripping immediacy, its schematic nature soon becomes irksome. Joseph is a concept, not a believable character, and the source of Abel's vicious nature is never explained. While the message of this cautionary tale is that good and evil "are indispensable to each other," the denouement is a disturbing moral lesson about the power of violence to expunge evil. (July 15)