Dismantled: A Novel [Hardcover]

Jennifer McMahon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 2009

The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Island of Lost Girls and Promise Not to Tell returns with a chilling novel in which the secrets of the past come back to haunt a group of friends in terrifying ways.

Dismantlement = Freedom

Henry, Tess, Winnie, and Suz banded together in college to form a group they called the Compassionate Dismantlers. Following the first rule of their manifesto—"To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart"—these daring misfits spend the summer after graduation in a remote cabin in the Vermont woods committing acts of meaningful vandalism and plotting elaborate, often dangerous, pranks. But everything changes when one particularly twisted experiment ends in Suz's death and the others decide to cover it up.

Nearly a decade later, Henry and Tess are living just an hour's drive from the old cabin. Each is desperate to move on from the summer of the Dismantlers, but their guilt isn't ready to let them go. When a victim of their past pranks commits suicide—apparently triggered by a mysterious Dismantler-style postcard—it sets off a chain of eerie events that threatens to engulf Henry, Tess, and their inquisitive nine-year-old daughter, Emma.

Is there someone who wants to reveal their secrets? Is it possible that Suz did not really die—or has she somehow found a way back to seek revenge?

Full of white-knuckle tension with deeply human characters caught in circumstances beyond their control, Jennifer McMahon's gripping story and spine-tingling plot prove that she is a master at weaving the fear of the supernatural with the stark realities of life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A prank gone wrong drives this outstanding novel from bestseller McMahon (Island of Lost Girls). The summer after graduation, four friends, who formed an art group called the Compassionate Dismantlers at Vermont's Sexton College, live together in a remote cabin and commit increasingly brash acts of sabotage. When they go too far and their leader, Suz Pierce, dies, the group disbands, vowing never to speak about what happened. Ten years later, two of the group, Henry DeForge and Tess Kahle, are unhappily married with a nine-year-old daughter, Emma. When the suicide of a Sexton friend sends a PI digging into the past, Henry and Tess fear that the dead may not be truly buried. By alternating the present-day lives of Henry, Tess and Emma with the origins of the Dismantlers, McMahon allows the inexorable sense of dread to build incrementally. Perhaps most memorable are not the young artists but Emma, a child whose intense imagination only adds fuel to the slow-burning fire. (June)
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From Booklist

“Dismantlement equals freedom.” “To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.” These are the credos of the Compassionate Dismantlers, a subversive clique of art majors in a Vermont college spearheaded by a sexy and diabolical prankster. Suz purports to be an eco-saboteur, but jealousy and revenge are her primary motives. How strangely bewitched her followers are, how dangerous their actions become, and how wretchedly things go wrong. Nine years after the outlaw group’s catastrophic demise, survivors Henry and Tess live isolated in the countryside, harboring a ruinous secret. Now it seems that the time of reckoning is at hand. As their sweet, preternatural nine-year-old daughter, Emma, grows increasingly, even maniacally devoted to her imaginary friend, inexplicable messages appear, crucial objects disappear, and someone is watching, if not stalking the increasingly freaked-out family. Are the Dismantlers reassembling? In her third, elegantly spooky mystery revolving around the vulnerability of a young girl and a haunting past, McMahon fashions a fresh and entrancing ghost-in-the-woods tale replete with startling psychoses, delectable Hitchcockian motifs, and dangerous attractions. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (June 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061689335
• ISBN-13: 978-0061689338
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #832,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother's house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic. I wrote my first short story in third grade. I graduated with a BA from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. A poem turned into a story, which turned into a novel, and I decided to take some time to think about whether I wanted to write poetry or fiction. After bouncing around the country, I wound up back in Vermont, living in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or phone with my partner, Drea, while we built our own house. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness -- I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full time. In 2004, I gave birth to our daughter, Zella. In 2005, we left the woods (for now), and moved to Barre, Vermont -- producer of one-third of all the granite gravestones and mausoleums in the US.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5) "Do you want to hear something that will change your lives forever?", June 13, 2010

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dismantled: A Novel (Hardcover)

From reading the publishers reviews of this title, I expected Dismantled to be riveting. Although it is well-plotted for the most part and moves towards a "frightening" conclusion, McMahon asks a lot from her readers and expects a high degree of naiveté. Between the oddly-prescient nine-year-old Emma De Forge, Emma's invisible sidekick, Danner, and the four college students who style themselves "the Compassionate Dismantlers", complete with manifesto, there are lots of misdirections in the story. On the face of it, the Compassionate Dismantlers are college rebels who indulge in petty pranks and criminal behavior on behalf of their beliefs, gathering at a remote Vermont cabin, where tragedy strikes one harrowing night, leaving the group with a dark secret.

In the near-decade since the group disbanded, Emma's parents, Henry and Tess, find their marriage floundering, the past weighing like a stone on the present. Suddenly it all becomes real again in the form of a postcard, Henry and Tess convinced their rural property is haunted by the dead. Emma begins snooping into her father's hidden papers at the instigation of her goofy school friend, Mel, the girls convinced the key to bringing the couple together lies in awakening the past. Emma's other friend is invisible; Danner tells secrets to Emma, their conversations increasingly troubling as evidenced in Emma's erratic behavior. Danner comes to life in the form of a rag doll Emma makes from scraps. The farm is literally crawling with malevolent characters, real and imagined, including a private detective who has been hired to dig into the suspicious activities of the Compassionate Dismantlers years ago at the cabin in Vermont.

What was most difficult for me to imagine is a group of art students embracing the concept of Compassionate Dismantlers- clumsy at best, ridiculous at worst. The leader of the group, Suz, is basically a sociopath who dresses in silk tunics, leotards and combat boots and has a grating penchant for calling everyone "babycakes". I really wanted this book to be more exciting and less middle-school scaring each other with horror stories. And I wish Emma wasn't so weird, regardless of her OCD. This book is perfect for a YA audience. But for grown-ups with a taste for Dan Simmons, Dismantled doesn't make the grade. Luan Gaines/2010.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not at all creepy and just overall disappointing..., July 24, 2010

By 

silenceiseverything "Proud Bookworm" (Manchester, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dismantled: A Novel (Paperback)

I wanted to love Dismantled, I really did. I absolutely loved and adored Promise Not to Tell by the same author. So much that to this day I still think about the Potato Girl. It was just an all around amazing novel. So my expectations for Dismantled were already through the roof when I picked it up. I guess that's what ultimately led me to be more than a little disappointed in it.

I guess my biggest gripe with the book were the characters. I just didn't like any single person in Dismantled, to the point where I could really not care less what happened to them. Suz, the leader of the Compassionate Dismantlers was anything but. Seriously, she was a total sociopath. I kept thinking about the psychology class I took last semester and thinking "She exhibits every single one of the characteristics of not only sociopathy but of narcissistic personality disorder". And then we have the rest of the characters: Henry, a bumbling idiot if I ever knew one and Tess was just plain annoying. Winnie, another one plagued with issues. All of these characters were just so unappealing.

The thing that bugged me the most was that Henry and Tess were clearly terrible parents. If my daughter was nine years old and still had an imaginary friend, the first thing I would do would be to have her evaluated. None of this "she's just an imaginative child, we should be proud" crap. You get a professional's opinion first. And if said daughter is in a pool, the last thing you want to do is get blitzed because then her imaginary friend is really going to be the least of your worries with the daughter being drowned and all. Now, the daughter, I found her to be all over the place. I just didn't find her "voice" at all credible. Sometimes she exhibited wisdom beyond her years and then other times (more often than not) she did something that a nine-year-old would just know better than to do. I found that she was written a bit clunky.

Also, Dismantled wasn't all that creepy. Now Promise Not to Tell scared the hell out of me. Dismantled...not so much. I just didn't buy Henry's "the doll is really Suz" theory. It was way too out there. And I read this one at night and it didn't even get one raised arm hair. The whole "Danner" thing was a bit off-putting, but again that was because I kept thinking "Man, these parents. Poor child..." Not scary in that whole "I'm going to leave my light on for the rest of the night" kind of way.

Still, I gave this book two stars instead of the dreaded one. Why? Because, man, was it a page-turner! Sure, the characters made me roll my eyes, but I still wanted to find out what happened. Not to them, but I wanted the whole plot, particularly the one with the "old" Compassionate Dismantlers to unravel. So, I have to say overall, the book was disappointing. Maybe if I hadn't already read Promise Not to Tell, I would've enjoyed it more. But since I did, all I could think was that Jennifer McMahon has definitely done better...

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Weird story about stupid people, June 9, 2010

By 

covergirl14 (Nottinghamshire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dismantled: A Novel (Hardcover)

I really think I've had my fill of tales about reclusive college types getting into 'intelligent' (really?) scrapes and killing one of their members.
I read The Secret History and hated it because all the characters were so up themselves and unlikeable. This was even worse. Unlike The Secret History, it did move on sharpishly and was readable, and didn't pretend it was a literary classic, but I still hated all of the characters. Why are these people so nasty and obnoxious? This crew seemed hell bent on destroying everything in their path - why should I sympathise with any of them? Why did Henry love Suz so much - she was a foul-mouthed, weird control freak and obviously not into men. Not my idea of attractive.
I just didn't feel comfortable or 'at home' with any part of this novel, although the premise was a decent one. I felt there was far too much attention paid to the female characters and their sexuality (I found the fact that THREE of them were lesbians/bisexual a bit hard to believe) and Henry just seemed overwhelmed by all of them (including his daughter) all the time. There was far too much emphasis on dreams and visions about dying and drowning - does Henry really still have these terrifying visions after ten years?
I tried to feel sorry for the lonely daughter but in truth, she was just a bit too weird as well! I wanted to tell her to get a grip - she was nine after all. Why did Tess and Henry not find the whole Danner thing REALLY WEIRD?!!
I sometimes like off-the-wall novels but this one just didn't ring true. And the double-twist at the end was just thrown in abruptly and was... you guessed it. Weird. And stupid.