The Four Stages of Cruelty

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The Four Stages of Cruelty (First Edition) Pub. Date: 12/7/2010 Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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Overview

Ditmarsh Penitentiary holds many secrets within its walls. A maximum-security prison, it contains every breed of hatred, self-destruction, greed, and regret. Its inmates aren't the only ones who grapple with these emotions. Under constant threat yet given absolute authority, the guards routinely cross the divide between law enforcement and criminality.

Corrections Officer Kali Williams takes pains to avoid the complicated traps of inmates and guards alike. Then a young inmate named Joshua comes to her for help. He claims that another prisoner has drawn an elaborate comic book, which holds a guide to the illicit underworld of Ditmarsh. The struggle to obtain the information encoded in its pages has been the cause of ever-increasing violence throughout the prison.

At first Kali can't take Joshua seriously. But soon afterward, the artist-inmate disappears completely. As she retraces his steps, she enters a labyrinthine world inside the prison with unexpected connections to the outside world. Along the way, she uncovers the most bewildering secret of all – the mystery of human compassion, the twisted forms it can take, and the violence and redemption it makes possible.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Joshua Riff, a 19-year-old convict at Ditmarsh Penitentiary, puzzles Kali Williams, a 39-year-old corrections officer, in Hollihan's impressive first novel, a complex and atmospheric thriller. The other COs are protecting Josh by keeping him segregated in the infirmary next to an enigmatic inmate, Jon Crowley. Josh has been helping Crowley illustrate a densely symbolic comic book based on prison life called The Four Stages of Cruelty, which conjures up history from Ditmarsh's dark past. When Crowley disappears, Williams investigates on her own. The clues take her beneath the prison to the long-abandoned isolation chambers that older convicts refer to as "the City," and from there things really get interesting. Hollihan manages to combine a labyrinthine plot, full of intrigue, secret societies, and arcane lore, with a nuanced, character-driven narrative that provides insights into prison life while keeping readers guessing until the last page. (Dec.)

Kirkus Reviews

A female corrections officer's humanity is tested by unthinkable brutality at a hellish maximum-security prison after she begins probing its secret criminal underground.

Hollihan's astonishing debut is told from the perspective of Kali Williams, a 39-year-old guard who is at greater mortal risk patrolling the creepy corridors of the Midwestern Ditmarsh Penitentiary than she was during a three-month military stint in Iraq. Kali is plenty tough—she wants to join the SWAT-like Urgent Response Force—but her vulnerable streak is exposed by her protective relationship with a withdrawn young misfit who is in the "howler ward" for murdering his girlfriend. He has in his possession a comic book drawn by a fellow prisoner that supposedly contains clues to where a cache of drug money was hidden years ago. After the book's artist shows up dead in the prison's shuttered, dungeon-like basement, a "wind chime" hanging from a door, Kali discovers that corruption permeates the place: The people she trusts are as suspect as the "barely human" individuals whose incurable addictions landed them there. Teamed with an undercover federal investigator, she is soon leading a dangerous double life in attempting to peel back layers of myth and reality. As airless and shadowy as the prison, the book goes well beyond conventional prison dramas with its unnerving intensity, graphic violence, discussions of the meaning of evil and "the mystery of human compassion" and lack of heroics. As thoughtful as it is violent, the narrative gets under your skin early and keeps you hooked even when you want to look away. Hollihan's first-person depiction of Kali and her struggles in no-woman's land is flawless. The network of arch villains, dealmakers, goons and do-gooders is drawn in convincing detail.

A darkly compelling, one-of-a-kind prison thriller.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780312592479
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Publication date: 12/7/2010
Edition description: First Edition
Edition number: 1
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 904,539
Product dimensions: 6.50 (w) x 9.40 (h) x 1.20 (d)

Meet the Author

KEITH HOLLIHAN worked as a business analyst and ghostwriter before publishing his first novel. Born in Canada, he has traveled widely and lived in Japan and the Czech Republic. He now lives with his wife and sons in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Read an Excerpt

I can think of no gentle way to begin.

I need to explain why the biggest mystery for me was not how an inmate could go missing inside a maximum security penitentiary, nor what the drawings meant, or even who was involved in the murders. The thing that stays with me, like the memory of a limb now gone, is the mystery of human compassion. The twisted variations of it, the love and the hurt, the obsession and the neglect, the abuse and the need, all commingled and bound. Although I am as cynical and skeptical as can be expected, given my experience, I am not one to deny that genuine relationships can form between inmates and corrections officers. I do know, however, that those relationships are almost universally based on some form of trade, a commerce of getting by. You need them as much as they need you, and I will admit that debts accumulate and sometimes must be paid off in ways that compromise what you think is right. This can happen to any of us.

My name is Kali Williams. I doubt that my parents, when they changed a few letters in the more conventionally spelled Kaylee, knew they were naming me after the many-armed Hindu goddess of darkness and destruction. But out of that dull midwestern instinct to be safe but slightly different, I sprang: a personality of sharp edges and bruising elbows.

If this were just a story about Ditmarsh Penitentiary and my work within it, I would probably start by discussing the routine and even the incidentally interesting aspect of being a thirty-nine-year-old female—one of only 26 women on a corrections staff of 312—providing daily operational security over 950 (plus or minus) hard-core assholes, sex offenders, addicts, liars, serial felons, white-collar dick suckers, gangbangers, and relatively honest murderers. I enjoyed my job. I liked the bang and clang of the cellblocks, the armored ease you needed to show in getting by, the acute attention to psychology and mood. For the most part, the bullshit bounced off me, the rat-a-tat routine of jokes and looks, the subtle grind of male criticism disguised half-assedly as helpfulness. I never questioned the right and wrong of the work—it was pretty goddamn clear to me, and still is—but there were times when I got stuck wondering how I’d become this person who wore the belt and jangled the keys and relied on the way the quick decisions got backed up by the remorseless rules. Nothing good came of those moods, however, and I avoided them as much as possible. I have an irritable impatience for the overly steeped, self-pitying emotions of anyone with too much time on their hands, including, and perhaps especially, myself.

This is not about my job, though, or about me; it’s about what happened, and all those mysteries I mentioned, and the mystery of compassion most of all. Even when I found the body dangling from a door in the abandoned cells beneath the prison, so terribly abused, it was the absence of compassion, the lack of pity in the place, that hit me hardest. Though surrounded by the dark output of violent lives, I had never before seen the ravages of such unrestrained brutality. I forced myself to edge past, pressing up against the cold wall where the scrawled drawings were most tangled, in order to see the face. In that dead gaze, was I the delayed rescuer or another tormenter? I’m not sure I can answer without sorting through the events that led up to it. As I said, I can think of no gentle way to begin.

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