From my childhood to my preteen years, I was terrified of men. There wasn’t an obvious explanation—I didn’t have any memories of disturbing interactions or abuse, and I came from a supportive and female-dominated family. And yet, I’d run across the street if I saw a man walking alone when I came home from school. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to read every book by Mary Higgins Clark the year I turned thirteen.
Immediately I could tell there was something that separated Mary Higgins Clark books from other mysteries and suspense novels. I’d read Carrie by Stephen King and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Higgins Clark’s books had less of a focus on horror or the mechanics of a mystery, and more of a bent toward what I’d later learn to call “interpersonal psychology.” The scary thing about her work was not the otherworldly monster, disease or disaster, but rather the exposed underside of the oft-idealized interactions between men and women.
In Higgins Clark’s novels, every man was a suspect. A tapestry of interrelated characters was revealed in short, episodic chapters, and each male character was bestowed with enough incriminating details that any one of them could be the killer or an accessory to the main string of crimes. While I recognized this at the time as a plot device to keep the reader engaged, what I didn’t realize is how closely it mirrors the experience of being a woman in America.
When you’re reading Mary, you begin to be suspicious of everyone. When I was younger I eventually began to think that was more of a narrative trick than a realistic representation of society. Re-reading Higgins Clark’s books as an adult gave me a different perspective—it’s not that all men are bad (though I’m often tempted to make this conclusion), it’s that as a woman, you need to be constantly vigilant in your interactions with men, whether they’re strangers, coworkers, friends, or lovers.
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Despite my excessive anxiety about men in my youth, I hadn’t actually had many creepy interactions with them. Alas, this luck would not hold out in the intervening years. Questionable treatment by men began not long after my Mary Higgins Clark year, and ran the gamut from benign to unlawful. An older coworker would text me incessantly to come to his apartment when his girlfriend was out of town, a teacher told me to come in for help every day after school, pressing his legs against mine under the desk, and proceeded to write me a vehemently negative college recommendation letter. College was the first time in my life where I began nurturing friendships with decent men, but it’s also where I was beaten on the chest in a field by a guy from my drawing class and where, after a party, I woke up on my best friend’s couch with a stranger on top of me, his hands in my underwear.
Drunk fraternity boys or shitty New York media men are not murderers, like the villains Higgins Clark portrays, but the parallels I found while rereading her novels this year put the behaviors into a dirty relief.In some ways, I’ve been luckier as an adult—the men I’ve dated in New York haven’t been violent, but they have been manipulative and at times emotionally abusive. Some of this became laughable in retrospect: being dumped because a man saw me as a slutty waitress instead of a serious dating prospect is the stuff of sitcoms, not thrillers. But as my female friends and I began to track the deceptions of men in our ostensibly progressive circle, we began to wonder if some of the men were closer to sociopath than clueless doofus, if we’d only condoned their behavior because we were so inundated to trauma from years of being on the receiving end of bad behavior.
Of course, drunk fraternity boys or shitty New York media men are not murderers, like the villains Higgins Clark portrays, but the parallels I found while rereading her novels this year put the behaviors into a dirty relief. Having encountered possible sociopaths, harassment, manipulation, and outright danger, the books felt more real and terrifying. Throughout most of Higgins Clark’s career, many people would have seen the attitude of regarding every man as a potential sex criminal as somewhat irrational. Now, that’s no longer the case. Nearly every week, allegations arise against another man who has wielded his power and privilege to hurt women. In the era of #MeToo, her worldview seems more relevant and resonant than ever.
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Women have been murdered by men in books for as long as novels have existed. But Higgins Clark’s work gets at something different—how manipulation and coercion play into men targeting women, rather than a simple whodunit murder mystery. Mary understood that the tactics of serial abusers are often more insidious than the obvious harassment that we’re told to beware of as young women. The villains in Higgins Clark’s books are not often found leering on the street, rather they use longer term methods of emotional manipulation to make their victims trust them before the inevitable crime. Though there is always one killer at the center of the story, the supporting male characters often reside in a gray area: we see them lying and covering their motives in a way that obscures who has well meaning intent and who is malicious.
The way that Higgins Clark’s villains alternately charm and manipulate their targets will be familiar to anyone who has been a victim of an abuser: physical, emotional, or a combination of both. She portrays the persuasive charm of abusers—in Pretend You Don’t See Her, after a woman has to assume a new identity in Minnesota via the witness protection program after witnessing a murder, the killer seduces the woman’s mother in order to ascertain her location.
In the beginning of Loves Music, Loves to Dance, we meet the unidentified killer who will go on to slaughter women, leaving their bodies in public places clad in an elegant outfit and a single dancing shoe. He relays the origins of his killing spree: a woman he was pursuing, with the gift of dancing shoes, rejected him, and he reacted by murdering her. The bones of this story are familiar to anyone who has been following the grievous side of the ‘incel’ movement: men who feel entitled to women’s attention and affection, enacting either imagined violence: proposed plans to force women to have sex with celibate men, or actual violence as evidenced in recent shootings. Though these communities are most often formed online, creating dark fantasy bubbles of horror inflicted on women, that does not quell the fear that if these men ever found power, the fantasies could become reality.
Of all of Higgins Clark’s novels, the one that terrified me the most as a youth is A Cry in the Night. The reason that the novel scared me the most is the same reason that it still has resonance today: unlike in Clark’s other novels, the protagonist isn’t living in a city, surrounded by friends and family who begin to catch on to the web of lies surrounding her. When Jenny MacPartland marries Erich Krueger, he brings her to live in the remote wilderness of Minnesota on a farm that has been in his family for generations. This isolation makes possible the nightmarish things that occur in Erich’s world, and it is also a tactic that men today use to make women more vulnerable to abuse. They isolate women from their friends and family, or purposefully date women with weak support networks or in vulnerable positions. Each of these tactics makes it more difficult for a woman to come forward about domestic abuse.
In Clark’s newest novel, I’ve Got My Eyes On You, we see her bringing her classic formula to the modern world: the characters ride in Ubers and police track the movements of suspect via the signal of their cell phones. But the myriad of suspects of a recent high school graduate’s murder are a reminder that unfortunately, bad men haven’t changed much in the 40 years that Higgins Clark has been publishing.
When I was a teenager, it was easy to believe that although Clark’s books were terrifying, they weren’t real life.Part of Higgins Clark’s mastery of the male villain is that the men who aren’t the perpetrators don’t escape her unsparing eye. Early in the novel, we watch as a suspect, the victim’s boyfriend, vehemently denies his involvement in the case and yet nevertheless focuses more on covering the tracks that could relate him to the murder, rather than engaging in genuine remorse that his girlfriend is dead.
I finished the book over breakfast alone in Brooklyn, and ended up crying alone at the bar into my eggs. I was attracted to and terrified by Higgins Clark’s novels as a teen, in equal measure. I had to hide A Cry in the Night in my family’s dining room because seeing it on the shelf kept me from sleeping, but I continued to pick up more books in the series, never daunted by my terrified reactions. But when I was young, they never made me sob.
It doesn’t take much guessing to wonder why I cried at this novel at the age of 27. In the fourteen years since I started reading Mary Higgins Clark novels, I went to college and was physically assaulted twice, targeted while drunk countless times, and watched nearly all of my friends encounter similar or worse traumas. As an adult, I’ve dated multiple men who manipulated me in ways I didn’t learn to recognize until we’d parted ways. I’ve watched friends had their emotions and lives mangled by the whims of men who seem to see our lives as fodder for their worst impulses. I’ve tried to help men that I considered friends overcome their abusive tendencies, and been made a fool as they lied to my face about accusations from women that I knew I had to believe.
When I was a teenager, it was easy to believe that although Clark’s books were terrifying, they weren’t real life. Rereading her now, they’re less of an escape than a reminder of reality, and the enduring tactics of men who are willing to go to desperate lengths to control women and contort their fates.
