Shank: A Novel [Hardcover]

Roderick Anscombe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1996

Imprisoned for killing his HIV-infected wife in what he claims was an act of mercy, Dan Cody escapes with a prison nurse as a hostage and recounts his life story on a radio call-in show. $250,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This rough but fascinating new thriller should have a warning label: some scenes of torture and masochism are very upsetting. But the writing is dazzling, and the story is one of those marvelous packages of deceit and self-delusion that make readers feel smart for being one step ahead of the narrator. Dan Cody tells us that he killed his first wife because she was HIV positive and he didn't want her to suffer. Now he's broken out of prison with a hostage--a prison nurse he claims to love as much as his late wife.

From Publishers Weekly

Dan Cody, this strange and gripping novel's storyteller, is a man who needs to be in love?passionately, recklessly, torturously in love?but it's clear from the outset that truth is not one of his love objects. A former high-school teacher, Cody was serving a life sentence at Denning State Prison for murdering his wife. He claimed that she asked him to kill her because she was HIV-positive, and he loved her too much to watch her die of AIDS. At his trial, however, it couldn't be proved that she was even sick. Now, Cody has escaped with the help of the new object of his raptures, a prison nurse named Carol, whom the reader is meant to see as a thoroughly ordinary, even slatternly woman. Cody confesses the details of his jailbreak and expresses his frantic adoration of Carol in letters to the host of a talk show, who reads them aloud nightly to an enthralled TV audience. It becomes clear from the letters that Carol broke Cody out of prison for money, not for love, and that she was a mere helper, not the escape's real engineer. From this revelation onward, a creepily fascinating, eloquent portrait of a man nursing his delusions among some very rough trade spirals away into mayhem. Psychiatrist and novelist Anscombe (The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula) writes compellingly enough to make readers care about the ordeal of his intensely strange protagonist, though some will balk at certain details?a nearly unendurable torture scene, and acts of self-sacrifice that defy belief. What begins as a memoir of powerful love ends up as a meditation on masochism?and seems to suggest that they are much the same. $250,000 ad/promo; film rights optioned by Kevin Costner's TIG Productions/Warner Brothers; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Japan, France, Brazil, Holland and Sweden; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 325 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion Books; 1st edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786862394
• ISBN-13: 978-0786862399
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,208,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant., June 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Shank (Paperback)

This book is brilliant because the main character Dan Cody is incredibly deep and complex. You think you understand him - his story is at first a little hard to swallow, but eventually you believe him. Then slowly you are brought to question his sanity. Very subtly, you are shown so many sides and angles to him, that youre not sure which is real.

Previous reader with negative review must have a brain the size of a pea.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good reason why you shouldn't want to go to jail., April 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Shank (Paperback)

After having doing some work inside a prision, I found this but to portray life for the inmates in a realistic way.

Read this book; it'll shock you and disturb you, but it will make you think!

3.0 out of 5 stars Can You See The Real Me?, November 15, 2010

By 

valis1949 "valis1949" (Springfield, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shank (Paperback)

Dan Cody is doing life without the possibility of parole for the murder of his wife. He claims that she was HIV Positive, and he was saving her from future misery, however, we only have his word on the matter. This novel is told in the first person by Mr. Cody, and he proves to be a truly 'Unreliable Narrator', in that the reader can never fully ascertain whether one is listening to a psychopath, or someone who has been wronged by fate. He claims that he is now in a mutual love affair with the prison nurse, Carol, and she has orchestrated an escape so that they can start a new life. And, they only need to get at a stash of several hundred thousand dollars which Dan may or may not be able to recover. A crazy plot, but the book is absorbing to the bitter end. This type of a story is better manifested in Jim Thompson's POP 1280, or Mark Hudson's THE MUSIC IN MY HEAD. A self-deluding, or pathological liar who tells the tale always makes for a disorienting and engrossing read.