“The Never List: A Novel” Author: Koethi Zan
Publisher: Viking Press
Pages: 303
Price: $27.95 (Cloth)
One rarely begins a review by quoting from the acknowledgements, but this is an unusual situation. Koethi Zan thanks a number of people including her daughters, who “are not allowed to read one word of [“The Never List”] until college.”
This is perfectly understandable.
This debut novel is not just a thriller; it is terrifying. You can’t put it down even though it gives you the creeps while reading and you know will give you nightmares.
The story is told by Sarah, 31 years old, now living in her Manhattan apartment. Sarah is damaged, has a variety of fears, foremost among them agoraphobia, and is almost a prisoner in her own home.
It has been ten years since she escaped from the cellar in which she and three other young women were kept, chained by their ankles to the wall, starved, and systematically tortured.
Her captor: a psychopath University of Oregon psychology professor, Dr. Jack Derber.
The demented Derber, a secretly crazed, Dr. Mengele-style perverse “scientist”-academic, was conducting sadistic research into the limits of physical pain and humiliation, total submission, mind control, even the possible elimination of his victims’ essential humanity. He applied inhuman pressure to learn if his captives would do ANYTHING to anyone to lessen their own pain.
Victims were easy to come by. Professor Derber had been a campus idol. “He’d virtually cast a spell over the classroom….He was charismatic, in a calm, hypnotic way, his voice soothing everyone into accepting ideas they’d never even considered sane before.”
But through guile and superhuman determination, after three years’ captivity Sarah had escaped and Derber was arrested.
Now, as the action opens, Derber is coming up for parole.
Sarah is urged to testify at the hearing along with two fellow victims: the New York socialite Christine “with hair the most shimmering shade of golden blonde I had ever seen,” and the once homeless New Orleans waif and street performer Tracy, now a radical feminist in Boston, “dyed black hair streaked with hot pink…tattoos and piercings all over her face.”
Derber’s victims have recovered differently.
Though Sarah and the others have been grievously injured by their ordeal, they are testaments to human resiliency. Determined that Derber stay in prison, they seek additional evidence against him. Sarah also vows to find the body of her friend Jennifer, a fellow captive she knows Derber killed.
Jennifer and Sarah had been roommates at college and were not careless free spirits even then. They had the Never List: what a girl should do to stay safe. Never accept a ride with strangers, never be stranded, never fail to check the back seat, never panic. It was a long list, nearly paranoid in its inclusiveness, but no list could take into account all the varieties and disguises of active human evil. They were abducted anyway.
As the three young women search for other possible victims and for Jennifer’s body, they travel back to Oregon and interview Derber’s colleagues and associates to discover that the mad doctor was not singular. Some psychology department colleagues are insanely ambitious. The professors are exploring bondage/discipline clubs and the subculture of sado-masochism.
Some are fascinated by the idea of transgression in the writings of Bataille, De Sade and Mirbeau. This obsession with French “theory” in the American academy, many would agree, nearly killed off the study of literature in English departments, but it is startling to learn that it can be literally deadly. And, grotesque as it may seem, Sarah’s investigations uncover networks of human slavery for purposes of torture, not just sex. The investigations even take them to southeast Alabama, not far from author Zan’s hometown of Opp.
A farm outside of Opp may seem an unlikely place of origin for the author of this most unusual novel, but Ms. Zan has an unusual biography.
After graduating as valedictorian from Opp High, Ms. Zan , mainly on a scholarship, went to Birmingham Southern College, travelling to New Orleans on many weekends to live the Goth life.
In another change of direction, she graduated from Yale Law School and had a fifteen-year career, first in corporate law and then in entertainment law, becoming deputy general counsel at MTV.
Now she is the author of an international best-seller written, she tells us, between 5 and 6 A.M. during her last year at MTV.
Some readers will find “The Never List” too strong, too graphic in its portrayal of human cruelty. It stops short of the methodical torture described in Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” but not much short.
Nevertheless, this is an astonishing first novel—thoroughly compelling and emotionally wrenching. Read it if you can stand it.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
