I’m thoroughly in love with James Tynion IV’s The Nice House series, so I was delighted when a friend loaned me books one and two of The Deviant: A Christmas Story.
Having finished them, I have to say they’re exceptionally well made and I really enjoyed them…except for the ending, which I thought was…fine? I don’t really have a complaint, I was just hoping it would go in a different direction.
Some spoilers below, until you get to the last few paragraphs, which have some MAJOR spoilers because I’ve gotta talk about that ending.
First up, I love Joshua Hixon’s art. It’s a deceptively simple style that actually contains stunning amounts of detail. I love everyone’s expressions, and every character feels distinct. The backgrounds are very intricate, with beautiful jewel-toned colors, and the cheerful Christmas elements are nicely creepy when contrasted with all the violence and gore.
The story itself is also deceptively simple: a young author, Michael, interviews an inmate, Randall, about the horrific murder of two young boys 20 years ago. Randall still claims they got the wrong guy, and now the murders have started up again. Is it a copycat or is the real killer still on the loose?
That’s the surface-level story, but it’s also about a young gay man coming to terms with the fact that his sexual awakening got mixed up in pornography and murder. He wonders if the world is right in calling him a deviant, not because he’s gay but because, deep down, maybe he’s just another monster.
And it’s about an old man who claims he’s innocent, aside from taking some very questionable photos.
That part of the story made me uncomfortable for sure. If we believe Randall’s story, he’s been in prison for two decades for someone else’s murder. But he admits to taking (and, uh, using, ew) photos of young boys in the shower, that’s never in question. If we believe him when he says he never touched those boys (or any others for that matter), is it okay for us to feel sorry for him? Taking those photos is pretty repulsive, I can’t get past that part. And yet…he was convicted of murder, but that wasn’t why everyone wanted him punished. Not for murder, maybe not even for the photos, but because he was gay, full stop.
Tynion doesn’t tell us how we’re supposed to feel about all that, he lets us sit in that uncomfortable space and make up our own minds.
(It doesn’t help that Randall is quite the unreliable narrator. Is he innocent of the murders or not? Spoilers: we never find out. Which is a brave choice for an author to make, but I’d rather have had more information.)
Side note, my favorite character in the whole series was Special Agent Hall, with his vape pen and his long coat and his very fashionable green nails. I would read an entire series about that guy, he’s awesome.
WARNING, BIG SPOILERS BELOW
As for the ending, when the real killer was revealed I was…puzzled. I honestly didn’t know who this person was. For one moment I thought it was Michael’s father, or his boyfriend’s father, which would’ve been a hell of a twist. Turns out, it’s one of the prison guards. And, after he’s revealed, we get an explanation from Randall: about how this guard was always nice to him because he believed Randall really was a murderer. The guard was so alone in his self-loathing, and he wanted permission to be what he thought Randall was: gay and a monster. In his mind, they’re really the same thing.
(This is exactly what Michael had been thinking, and Tynion did a great job of walking us down the garden path on that one. He almost had me convinced Michael was the copycat, several times.)
If we’d been told the guard’s history before the reveal it would’ve made it too easy to see it coming: of course he’s the murderer. So I understand why we didn’t get that history till the very end.
But I don’t think we saw enough of the guard to make the reveal satisfying. I was worried that I’d missed his appearances earlier in the book, but he doesn’t show up much at all. If I’d recognized him by the end, the reveal would’ve made me go “OH OF COURSE WOW.” As it is, when I figured out who he was I went “Oh. Okay. I guess that makes sense.”
I didn’t dislike the ending by any means, a lot of it was surprisingly sweet, and thought-provoking, and it absolutely wraps up the story. I was just hoping for the final twist to be more of a shocker.