Customer Reviews

Panic Attack

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is one of those books that once you start reading you can't put down. Although it may not be the world's greatest work of literature it is completely engaging and will have you on the edge of your seat. It is interesting to see how one random act can snowball and affect the lives of many. I agree with other reviewers who say that the characters aren't likeable...and that is this book's one downfall. It was hard to care whether the characters were killed or spared. The only one who had any sense at all is the Grandmother, but unfortunately she appears too late, near the end of the book. But even with those flaws I found PANIC ATTACK to be a fast-paced thrill ride that kept me reading until the wee hours of the morning.

Jason Starr's "Panic Attack" opens with psychologist Adam Bloom awakening from a recurring nightmare in which he is being chased by a large black rat. He gets up with a start in the middle of the night when his twenty-two year old daughter, Marissa, yanks his arm in fear. She whispers to her father and mother that an intruder has entered their home. While Adam's wife, Dana, calls 911, Adams impulsively decides to take out his gun and confront the criminal. This unwise decision is the first in a long line of mistakes made by Adam and his family.

The Blooms have more than their share of troubles: After twenty-three years of marriage, Adam and Dana are no longer emotionally or physically close. Dana, who is a bored housewife, believes that her husband is too self-absorbed to care about her feelings and that that he is more interested in his practice than he is in her. She also detests Adam's condescension and frequent use of psychobabble to put her in her place. Although Adam loves Marissa, he is fed up with her. After completing her studies at Vassar in art history, she returns to her parents' home, acquires tattoos, puts pink streaks in her hair, and spends most of her time hanging out with friends. She has made no realistic plans to find a job that would enable her to live independently. Her father constantly squabbles with Marissa, ordering her to get her act together.

Starr has written an electrifying and well-constructed novel with a sociopathic villain who is all the more sinister because he is so handsome and charming. He finds a way to insinuate himself into the lives of this troubled family with disastrous consequences. However, "Panic Attack" is more than an excruciatingly suspenseful and fast-paced thriller. It is also a distressing portrait of a father, mother, and daughter who can no longer speak to one another without rancor. Bloom may have some talent as a clinician, but he is a deeply flawed husband and father with a hair-trigger temper. Dana makes serious errors in judgment that come back to haunt her, and to round out this dysfunctional trio, Marissa's selfishness and irresponsibility complete her family's descent into free fall. As imperfect as they are, however, these three people do not deserve to have a vicious and sadistic killer manipulate them and use their vulnerabilities against them. Reading the exciting and unpredictable "Panic Attack" is like watching a terrible car crash. We know that we should not stare, but it is difficult to look away.

Starr writes in a kind of urban noir, his novel seemingly predictable; meanwhile, he slyly twists and turns both characters and plot to deliver a tale of human nature run awry in the modern world. When psychologist Adam Bloom's daughter wakes him one night, whispering that there is someone downstairs, Adam grabs his gun against his wife's advice, shooting and killing a burglar. In full panic mode, Adam unloads his weapon on the intruder while the man's accomplice escapes. When the family housekeeper is murdered the next morning, the repercussions endure long after that violent night.

The Bloom's are a contemporary family caught up in the usual distractions, self-absorption and too little time to pay attention to one another. Adam's wife, Dana, is chronically unhappy, now furious with her husband for not listening to her warnings and resorting to his gun, the marriage showing visible cracks. And twenty-two year old Marissa, a recent college graduate, has yet to find a path in life, resenting her father's suggestions that she get a life, hiding from responsibility by spending her nights drinking and partying with friends. Marissa reflects her parents' disharmony, in full rebellion as she pours her feelings into a blog, acting out as only the young and disenchanted can do. The shooting incident shakes this family from their already weak foundations, their lack of communication exacerbated by isolation.

Starr writes of a family floundering in the wake of notoriety, the news media hounding Adam with endless questions. Nearing fifty, Adam has created no niche for himself professionally, his fifteen minutes of fame turning from opportunity to nightmare as he is labeled the next Bernie Goetz. As the pressures mount and a new danger threatens the family, instead of pulling together, the Bloom's nurture private grievances in a society beset with technological distractions and the availability of too much information, making them the perfect target for a particular predator. In this ragged journey from one impulsive moment of violence to a final confrontation, events are set in motion that have shocking consequences.

In spite of advanced technology, the beleaguered Bloom family cannot relate to one another, each finding solutions elsewhere, setting the stage for a diabolical plan for revenge, as unexpected as it is clever plotting. Starr writes with a bite, his characters defined by their circumstances and limited expectations, products of an environment where consequences are ignored for the sake of a news cycle, a mosh pit of self-interest and rage, where action trumps thought, guns are ubiquitous and the Golden Rule but a memory. Luan Gaines/2009.

Yeah, Jason Starr is now officially one of my favorite authors.

I already thought he was pretty cool after I read The Chill, a graphic novel he wrote for Vertigo, but I was slightly biased because I pretty much love everything Vertigo gets on ink. While I liked the story, The Chill wasn't horribly memorable to me...but it did have boobies. Lots and lots of boobies.

This book reads extremely fast! I kept telling myself "only one more paragraph" up until the point where I'm like "ok I can finish the chapter, no problem" and then I'd have to look away from the book before I started reading again.

The dynamics between the Blooms was pleasant to read. It was nice to read a family that actually sounds like a family! (The fact that Marissa has no job after college graduation was quite realistic, especially these days.) They aren't the Sopranos but they aren't the ****ing Cleavers either: The Blooms have problems. Like you, like me.

On top of of that, they seem miserable and full of contempt in almost every page. One feeling that I really touched with was that idea where just when things are starting to get better, BAM! the floor drops and the downfall begins. You never get the feeling that they were never happy; just that it is difficult in this current year of their lives to seek an equilibrium. Though they try so hard after someone attempts to rob their house, and Adam blows him away.

The villain of this story also was quite believable and his pages seemed to be the ones I read the fastest. You start to sympathize with what he is doing to the point where it is like "Whoa, why was I rooting for this man?!" I had no problems understanding all the actions he took, because Starr did such a fine job giving us the minute details of the dude.

I know (filmmaker)David Fincher has acquired the rights for this book, and I have to say I will go see this if it is adapted. I don't think I will read it again so that's why it gets four stars from me. Amazing story, and I do recommend it for anyone who loves a thriller (which I'm hoping is anyone who reads books).

This is quite a good story. Like with the only other Staar book I've read, (The Follower) the characters are not very likeable. The victims you are supposed to be feel sorry for, and root for to make it to the final page in one piece, well you're sort of cheering on the villain with this one. Johnny's a great villain too, a little up himself but Starr shows through reading through the other characters eyes that some things he thinks he's pulling off perfectly (such as being the ultimate lover) he's actually quite mediocre at. Reliving the scenes through each character's perspective does benefit with knowing Johnny isn't really perfect but it just seems to prolong parts of the story at most times when you just want it to move on so you can find out what happens next. At one stage we have (without giving away who) someone discovering Johnny at the backdoor and letting him in, then we go back and read Johnny walking up to, choosing to use that door instead of the front and waiting outside. Nothing beneficial to the plot was added with that and some of the other reliveances of the plot through other character's eyes. If Starr had combined them all to be happening at once and revealed time wise to the reader at the same time the pace of the book would have been all the more higher, making a better read.

Basic plot of Panic Attack. Dr Adam Bloom is awakened next to his bored and ungrateful for how she lives housewife by his adult daughter Marissa, who is living at home because her entry level job at a museum wasn't exciting enough for her and she expects another that better recognises her uni qualifications and talent will be handed to her shortly. Marissa tells her father that someone is in the house. Adam goes to investigate, but takes his gun with him. When an intruder comes up the stairs Adam tells him to stop, the guy mocks him and reaches inside his jacket and the terrified Adam fires his weapon. Carlos is dead, shot ten times and he was unarmed. Adam thinks he is now a big man, that women he went to high school with will now wish they had him, and that he will be praised in the streets. However the New York community and media are not in agreement with his opinion.

Also in the house that night was Carlos' accomplice Johnny. Carlos had since childhood protected the good looking smaller Johnny from severe bashings and the like. Johnny will avenge his like a brother friend. Since in his mind Johnny is the world's greatest casanova, he has come up with the ultimate plan that involves Adam's daughter. He will not just kill Adam but make him feel the pain of loss that he has just endured, and more!

I have taken a liking to reading about dysfunctional New Yorkers (are there any other kind?) and this book was recommended to me by a friend.

I won't summarize plot details, which others have done very capably. What I liked most about the book was Starr's ability to write a good, solid novel of suspense - with plenty of creepy moments starring a world-class sociopath named Johnny Long who takes on the nom-de-murder of "Xan Evonov - while stepping back and wryly observing the participants and their monumental level of self-absorption. You'll have a tough time figuring out whom you dislike most, as it will vary from point to point in the book. Sometimes you'll want to shake the short-sighted, reality-denying father, who is ironically a psychologist; other times you'll want to slap the adulterous, cougar-esque mother, a first-class study in drama and neurosis; and rarely will you want to do anything but strangle the spoiled brat of a daughter, who thinks the world owes her something and that she owes her parents nothing.

Starr blends insight into what makes these people who they are with a believable story that doesn't stray too far from the headlines (while also commenting a bit on the state of journalism today). I had a quibble or two with some of the passages, in which Starr tells more than shows. His technique also includes a fair amount of backtracking, in which something occurs - then you go back and read about the events leading up to it, with a replay of those events - and then something else occurs - and the backtracking happens again. This takes a little getting used to, but it's part of the way the author examines the psychology of each character, and in that regard it works.

I thought the book a bit too long but did enjoy it and will read more by Starr. A warning that you have to have a good amount of tolerance for unlikable characters. I actually enjoy reading about characters who are so thoroughly unlikable, as I find them much more based on reality. There's really no one to root for here, just a bunch of people who never do seem to learn their lesson (much as in real life). And as I said, I do enjoy reading about dysfunctional New Yorkers and their neuroses. Starr has done that very well, from a suspense/thriller angle. Another book I recommend, from a mystery/equally satirical angle is ANDROGYNOUS MURDER HOUSE PARTY, by Steven Rigolosi, about a massively self-centered group of back-stabbing Manhattanites, which is equally wry in its observations and laugh-out-loud funny.

"Panic Attack" - the phrase alone is enough, after reading this newest psychological suspense novel by Jason Starr, to trigger just such a reaction.

Psychologist Dr. Adam Bloom and his wife, Dana, are awakened by their twenty-two-year-old daughter Marissa in the middle of the night when she hears sounds indicating someone is in their home in Forest Hills Gardens, in Queens, New York. The ensuing scene is like the nightmare he had been in the midst of, except that this one is real: After retrieving the gun he had safely secured in his closet, never having used it before except at the pistol range where he occasionally went to practice, he steps out into the hallway and sees a man climbing the stairs towards him. Before the man can get any further, Adam shoots him several times, killing him, and warns a second man on the floor below to get out of his house before he kills him as well.

The fallout from this horrendous incident doesn't play out quite the way Adam had imagined it would. The following day "he didn't think about the shooting at all until he went downstairs, passing the spot on the staircase where the body had fallen . . . It was almost like it hadn't even happened . . . " Not even close.

Reactions were not as Adam would have expected them to be. He is portrayed as some kind of trigger-happy vigilante. He is resentful of the way people, including his patients, are responding to him, and perplexed, thinking: "If he'd killed someone for no reason, murdered someone, or even if he'd killed someone accidentally, by a mistake he'd made, he'd have something to feel guilty about. For example, if he'd killed someone in a traffic accident, he would've had to accept responsibility. But this situation had been completely different. This hadn't been an accident: this had been self-defense." And that's before he even factors in the potential thinking on the part of the second man who was in his house that night, who'd been brought on board for the burglary by the dead man.

The Blooms are more or less your average upper-middle class family, with the same frailties as most of us, no more or less, and all the more sympathetic for it. After the incident, things don't go back to what used to pass for normal. In fact, they escalate into nightmarish proportions, and the anxiety level of the reader right along with them. The author uses the device of describing a scene from the p.o.v. of one character, followed by that same time frame depicted from the p.o.v. of another character, which is interesting and very effective, although it was at first unsettling and took a brief bit of getting used to. As well, the author manages to inject just the right amount of irony into this dark tale, which is recommended.

It's often hard for me to read and review a book filled with such unlikable characters. Adam Bloom, is, in short and to use the vernacular of today's teens...a douche. A strutting banty rooster of a man, certain he behaved heroically, when what he did was panic and over-react. Dana, a self-absorbed woman, is intent on fighting off the years and looking young as she hooks up with her trainer. His spoiled, equally self-absorbed daughter Marissa, who flits from relationship to relationship while posting all her "deep" thoughts on her blog. The type of young woman who is not only sure of her place in the world, but believes it to be her place because she deserves it, not because she's earned it. Then we have the antagonist, Xan. Yikes, is he a piece of work. I do believe he's even more egotistical and arrogant than Adam Bloom. At one point in time, I thought that Adam's character had a moment of clarity and possibly redemption, but I was wrong. Up until the end, Adam was sure that Adam knew best and only he could save the day. Xan remained a deluded and arrogant sociopath, and Marissa, who had the most to learn from all this, remained completely oblivious to her own responsibility for the situation.

A couple things I learned from this book though...First, I'm eternally grateful that I'm not married to a psychologist. All Bloom's talk of his "feelings" is annoying!

The book has numerous conversations between Dana and Adam, where Adam is intent on discussing things in the proper way, using, as the author calls them "I-statements". I'd probably murderate my hubby if he talked like that.

Second, one of the things I really took from this book is how easy a personal blog can make life for a stalker or con man.

*Note to teens and young women...do not post "where I'll be tonight's" on your blog. Don't tell your life story on your blog. We think we're all anonymous online, but really it's as if you handed a stranger your date book and diary and said, "Knock yourself out..." *

Now comes the hard part. Would I recommend this book? I just can't seem to answer that. But then, maybe that's an answer right there. I thought it had an unsatisfying end, although there was an "oh crap" moment that I wasn't expecting. And none of the redemption I was looking for showed up at all. I guess it's probably pretty realistic, but I like it more when clueless, self-absorbed jerks, realize the error of their ways and try to make things better. This bunch...didn't even bother, which sort of left me feeling vaguely depressed and disappointed.

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of what Jason Starr has done within the pages of PANIC ATTACK, his latest novel. The book garnered some pre-publication attention when he and Minotaur Books opened a two-week window during which one could obtain and read the work for free. Such a move requires a certain degree of confidence that what you are giving away is good enough that it will be purchased in more permanent form. That confidence is met --- and rewarded. This is a work that transcends genres and puts into collision the moral ambiguity of the characters of Richard Prather, the seedy underbelly of humanity recorded by Nelson Algren, and the fatal foibles of the well-to-do and chronicled by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

PANIC ATTACK begins with a simple enough premise. The Bloom residence --- inhabited by Dr. Adam Bloom, a psychologist; his wife Dana; and their daughter Marissa, a recently graduated but still unemployed 22-year-old --- is the object of a home invasion. Bloom does the honorable thing in defending his family and fatally shoots one of the intruders as the man is coming up the stairs; the other, unobserved, barely escapes with his life. Problems begin almost immediately. The intruder turns out to have been unarmed, the couple had frequently quarreled about Adam having the firearm in the house, and both Dana and Marissa are horrified that Adam has killed someone.

Though they are living in a mental fairyland --- it is an immutable law that when seconds count, which is the case during a home invasion, the police are there in minutes --- it is almost immediately obvious that there is much going on beneath the surface of the Blooms' family life. Dana and Adam keep secrets, each from the other, which could easily tear the family apart. Marissa, degree notwithstanding, is aimless and drifting, spending her evenings drinking with friends who have begun their own lives in the world of work while she spends her days writing a blog and listening to her iPod.

The Blooms are not bad people; it is, in fact, a direct and proximate if unintended result of their kindness that has led them to be the targets of what was supposed to be a simple burglary. While being full of oneself is not evil, it is a character flaw, and what Starr shows us in bits and pieces is that both Adam and Marissa are choking on their overstuffed egos. Adam considers himself a hero and begins giving impromptu press conferences to the press assembled on his front lawn following the shooting. He is puzzled when he finds his words taken out of context, his intent misinterpreted. Marissa is embarrassed for herself, not for her father, whose actions were initiated, at least in part, for the purpose of protecting her. For Adam and Marissa, everything is about them, individually.

As we observe them constantly at loggerheads throughout the course of PANIC ATTACK, we can only marvel at how much alike they are. Dana is jaded and unhappy, a condition that was present even before the Bloom household was breached. It is her unhappiness --- a state of mind that exists notwithstanding the fact that she has everything she wanted --- combined with her own sense of post-menopausal entitlement that provides the means by which the blocks that comprise the Bloom family come tumbling down.

While the family individually plays out their respective aftermaths to the shooting, the second Bloom household burglar --- the one who got away --- plots a twisted revenge. His skewed morality demands a pound of flesh for the death of his accomplice, even while it did not require that he stay and see to his friend after he was shot, or wonder about the circumstances that found them in another person's home with bad intent to begin with. His plan for retribution starts with research, followed by a skillful and fascinating manipulation that results in his insertion into the very lives of the Bloom family. This time, instead of breaking in, he is invited in, with only one even remotely aware of what is occurring until it is far too late. The book plays out to a stunning and horrifying conclusion, one that will leave you wondering who among the cast of characters is the greater villain.

PANIC ATTACK is Starr's best work to date, combining a flawless plot with a pitch-perfect sense of storytelling that never fails to surprise. He introduces the smartest character within its final 60 pages, even as he sets up a climax that will make you forget to breathe. You will remember to breathe again, but you will never forget this book.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

This book held my interest even though there were no likeable characters. As usual, Jason Starr effectively uses dark humor and suspense as he lets the characters unravel their lives, and unravel they do in increasingly foolish manners! In my opinion, this is a worthwhile read and I strongly recommend it to thriller fans who enjoy dark humor.