The Four Stages of Cruelty: A Novel [Hardcover]

"Four Stages of Cruelty" is a precise description of life behind bars as seen through both the prisoner's and the guard's viewpoints. It's chilling. Kali is one of the few female guard's at her facility and she feels like an outsider. Nineteen year old Josh is one of the youngest and newest prisoners and is completely lost as he tries to settle into life behind bars. Hollihan tells his story through both Kali and Josh's eyes though Josh's voice rings truer.

Josh's next door cellmate Crawley has drawn a cartoon booklet and when feels his life is endangered he gives it to Josh for safekeeping. Josh doesn't know what the drawings mean but senses they're important so he tries to pass the booklet to Kali when she escorts him to his father's funeral. Kali refuses to take it but continues to worry about its significance. She begins to investigate as riots break out in the prison knowing the booklet and the escalating violence are related. There are lots of twists and turns and a great ending in this book. Hollihan is very successful in keeping the reader's interest though Kali comes across as a bit mechanical. His play with who is more imprisoned, the jailer or the jailed, is fascinating and clearly delineated; the best part of the book in my opinion. I can't wait to read more from Hollihan.

I was looking for something new to read and happened across this book on Amazon. The cover art, entirely appropriate it turns out, seemed a little juvenile to me at the time -- more like something you'd see on a graphic novel than on a sophisticated novel about a female corrections officer working in a Minnesota penitentiary for men.

So I got the free Kindle sample just to be sure it was a worthwhile read, and once I was in, I was hooked.

The New York Times said this was one of the best novels of 2010 and they weren't wrong. It's a very dark book, but not quite in the way you might think. Sure it's set in a prison, and that makes it gritty, but The Four Stages of Cruelty focuses more on the internal politics that not only shape prison life but anyone's life.

How can you tell who's right and wrong when everyone around you seems to have ulterior motives? What is the nature of evil and goodness, and who gets to define that and why? Are people capable of lasting change or will they take advantage of you for being compassionate?

The lines between good and bad are constantly blurred in this novel, and the tension comes from guard Kali Williams' struggle with the byzantine interests at play within the prison and what those interests say about the more nefarious aspects of human nature. The dialogue is spot-on and Hollihan's writing is so convincing, I thought he had to have been a corrections officer or convict in a previous life (he's just talented as hell and did incredible research, it turns out).

I like both literary and crime fiction, but I really love novels that blur the lines between those uber-genres. This is one of those books. In some ways it reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Kali Williams as Marlowe), but it also had the kinetic energy of a James Ellroy novel.

It may be dark, even terrifying in its implications, but it's also a fun, exciting read. I can't recommend this book highly enough for fans of Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy, George Pelicanos, etc.

THE FOUR STAGES OF CRUELTY starts out as a hard-boiled dramatic tale of one woman's experiences as a corrections officer in a men's penitentiary. She's an outsider twice over as both a woman in a man's world and as a straight arrow in an institution which appears to have a good share of extra-legal activity going on among both inmates and officials. Author Hollihan has done his research and deploys the information he's gathered in a believable manner. And then the corrections officer discovers a gruesome underworld beneath the prison and the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket.

All of the carefully constructed realism of the book's beginning evaporates instantly as the main character becomes embroiled in a shady undercover operative's inexplicable investigation, a comic book takes on a sort of biblical importance, inmates move about the prison at will, officers at every level of the prison infrastructure ignore every gross malfeasance of duty and protocol, and a laughably improbable jailbreak results in a full-scale riot.

If Hollihan had intended a surreal and fanciful descent into madness at the juncture where the underground is revealed, then his imagination fails him badly. The underground cells, the comic book, the undercover investigation, the "Ditmarsh Social Club," and even the main character's Iraq war experience are all dead ends, leading nowhere. Everyone's motivations remain impenetrable right to the abrupt and facile end.

THE FOUR STAGES OF CRUELTY (what ARE the four stages of cruelty anyway?) reads like a book that was sold to a publisher on the basis of its first 150 manuscript pages, and then finished by a ghostwriter on a too-short deadline.