The trippy and questionable science at the surface of One Word Kill barely detracts from or adds to the novel’s fairly stereotypical coming-of-age style story. Not an astounding work but a fair one with its moments. If only it felt more like itself.

Summary

January 1986. London. Nick Hayes is dying from cancer. He is also experiencing a completely surreal event in his life. A stranger shows up to task him with a quest that has to be completed in a short time frame. Fitting for a nerd who plays Dungeons & Dragons with his friends: Elton, Simon, and John. There’s a girl Nick has just met: Mia. The sparks are there on both sides. Too bad about the cancer, eh? And too bad the stranger’s quest is somehow tied to the safety of Mia’s future. Also there’s a hyperviolent bully who has a bone to pick with Nick. Now, what were the instructions again?

Content Warning

Some violence, though the roughest moment is off screen. Children with cancer is a big throughline. Racism by side-characters (opposed by the main). Homophobia is hinted at, but barely dwelled upon [which, honestly, surprised me, I applaud the restraint].

Review

Early on in One Word Kill, I was completely caught up in the time and effort Lawrence was spending developing the scene around Nick Hayes’ cancer treatment. It was thoughtful. Painful. There are several quotes, here, that are poignant and beautiful.

In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it.

That’s spectacularly well-written.

Then things start to get a bit weird in the capital-W sense and I was enjoying myself quite a bit. Then they got weirder and I was on board. The first 20% or so had me excited for how this was going to turn out.

Only, once we started getting into the actual story, I kept feeling like I was not entirely into the book. I liked it ok, enough to keep reading, but for a book that reads this fast it was strange how it felt like it was slowing down. The things that irked me were almost never louder than the things I enjoyed — the exception being perhaps how 1980s-nostalgia-coded trope-driven the characters felt1 which gave the book a sense of being copy-pasted from other works from and about that time period — and quite often I wondered what it was that was actually irritating me.

Some of it is that the book dawdles here or there. Takes more time than it should to say things that end up feeling like missed opportunities (e.g., echoes between their D&D session and the real world gets mentioned but also left out to dry time and again). Some of it was the strange science which both propelled and yet limited the book. I mostly give the book a pass on these because it is the first in a trilogy and place-setting and world-building sometimes need a sacrificial lamb. Let the author cook and all that. It’s possible that the science will make more sense and actually be developed. It’s possible that small details will come back to matter. It disrupts but does not dishearten, at least not yet.

The book is obsessed with a time (1986) and place (London, UK) but also it feels so very removed from that time and place outside of the kind of stuff you could search through Google or Wikipedia. It is missing a vibrancy of locality despite plastering a lot of brand-name callbacks (partially because the loudest callbacks are American artists and media). It could have been Chicago as much as London with a few changes of place names. Hell, most of the stuff talked about was popular in Alabama at the same time.

One Word Kill is not as clever nor as exciting as it wants to be, but it is fairly clever and fairly exciting. Its strongest feature is how the core group of friends interact and rest of the book likes to get in the way of this.

Maybe if Lawrence dropped at least one of its too many high-concepts. The girl over her head vs the hyperviolent bully vs the strange science vs the cancer vs the coming-of-age story. Another side-effect of it being part of a trilogy? Too many fish in the fish-tank because are are getting a bigger fish-tank and you will want all those fish? I don’t know.

I’m still invested enough to keep going and am starting the second book right away. Not with as high of hopes as I started this one but I am at least curious. Lawrence can for sure write, and write well, he might just need more time to find the song in the midst of the noise. I’m down to keep listening.

  1. While I could dwell on how stereotypical Mia, Simon, and Rust are…I think it’s the “kiss the girl” line that made me shake my head the hardest. ↩︎