When "Publish or Perish" Turns Deadly... (Kill All Your Darlings thriller REVIEW)

Ask any writer what their biggest fear is, and they might say it’s no one reading their work. (Well, that, or forgetting to hit “save”, then experiencing a catastrophic power outage or random computer shutdown. That’s definitely another big one.) 

If you asked what plagues them most often, though, chances are, it’s gonna be writer’s block. The muse disappearing. Being stuck. No matter what they call it, every writer goes through it… and it totally sucks. 

Most of us try to find inspiration, somewhere, somehow. Or we put the writing aside, to let our thoughts (hopefully) percolate. Maybe we start working on something else, entirely.

Or, one can go a very, very different route… as does the protagonist in David Bell’s gripping thriller, Kill All Your Darlings.

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Connor Nye is an English professor on the fast track at a small college, when tragedy strikes: his wife and son are killed, leaving him alone and adrift. 

He manages to keep it together enough to hold onto his job, but the rest of Connor’s life has pretty much gone to shit. He drinks himself into oblivion every night, partying with his closest friends (or with some of his students)… but somehow makes it to class again, each day.  

His hold is increasingly tenuous, though; as a teacher on the tenure route, the rule is “publish or perish”… and Connor hasn’t been able to produce anything worth reading in a very long time. (Writer’s block? He has it, in a big way.) 

But just as the walls are closing in, a miracle (of sorts) happens: a student—who’d recently left her manuscript, a thriller, for him to critique (and which, coincidentally, turns out to be one of the best things he’s ever read)—goes missing. The sort of missing that, after months of police searches and investigating, turns into a ruling of “presumed dead”.

Then a lightbulb goes off in Connor’s head—a possible way out of his dire straits—and, making yet another in a string of really bad life decisions, he makes a plan to do the unthinkable: to submit his student’s work… as his own.

 

Practically overnight, everything changes. A publisher snaps up the manuscript, and the resulting book becomes a huge success. Connor gets an agent, lands a lucrative book deal, and goes on tour. The chair of the English department is thrilled (even if not all of his coworkers share in the joy), and Connor’s position at the university is cemented.

Until one night, during a reading at an area bookshop a couple of years later, Connor gazes out into the audience, connecting with the adoring crowd… and looks right into the eyes of the young woman whose words he’s reciting. A very much not-dead, not-missing woman. A woman who looks anything but pleased by his performance. 

When she turns up on his doorstep later that evening, demanding he pay her the royalties he’s made—and threatening to out him, if he doesn’t—Connor is terrified. For one thing, there is no money; it’s already been spent. Worse, everything he’s achieved—the fame, the recognition, his secure job—would be undone, in a heartbeat. 

But that’s merely the tip of the iceberg… because around the same time, the police also begin questioning him, as a suspect, after someone notices key points in “his” book are exactly the same as some never-released-to-the-public details from a local unsolved murder case… and if there’s one thing the police aren’t big on, it’s “coincidence”.

The more Connor struggles to understand how any of this could’ve happened, the more fraught his situation becomes; does he admit to blatant plagiarism and outright theft (no doubt losing his job, and the perks of prestige)… or does he try to ride it out, believing that he had nothing to do with any murder (despite how it very much looks, in print)? 

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Kill All Your Darlings has an über-current, ripped-from-the-headlines feel, with themes of “he said, she said” and “me too” running throughout. 

Surprisingly, though, Connor manages to be a (mostly) sympathetic character (and thank goodness for that, or this wouldn’t have been nearly such a compelling read)—despite committing one of the greatest sins any creative can: the wholesale theft of intellectual property. His despair and angst are palpable, and you can (at least on some level) understand why/how he was able to talk himself into doing what he did. 

The tension escalates gradually… but once built up, charges full-speed ahead, never letting up. There are no dull moments, here; this thriller lives up to its name.

Kill All Your Darlings is a really well-told tale—one I raced through (as quickly as possible, anyway, for a 400-plus-page book)—and the ending, when I got there, felt like the perfect one. 

You really can’t ask for more than that, can you?

~GlamKitty