A girl named Jack was raised to be a killer. A cult leader/evil sorcerer named Cyrus trained her to be the perfect assassin, and by the time she was teenager, she was already murdering like a pro. Cyrus is basically evil incarnate: without any scruples or principles whatsoever, completely dominating those around him.
L.C. Barlow’s PIVOT is uncompromisingly dark, filled with horrific acts and characters more demonic than any actual demon ever could be, and yet one can not help but find the hope in this novel, and more strangely, none of that hope feels at all unearned. PIVOT asks us to consider whether or not any good could arise from Cyrus’ world of cruelty and nihilism, and actually goes into trying to answer this question, rather than just becoming a saccharine, feel-good fable about the triumph of good over evil.
Sure, PIVOT might get a bit full of itself in all its philosophizing – such as the scene where Jack’s college boyfriend becomes insanely possessed with the desire to know Jack’s opinions on the existence of God, which does sort of come off as a little self-consciously literary – but PIVOT is smart enough to pull this self-conscious-literariness off, whether it’s offering its take on the difference between angels and demons: “Angels aren’t anything but demons well-governed. They aren’t anything but the sharks and the wolves and the snakes that don’t bite and slither and slake” or name-dropping the slam poet Anis Mojgani in relation to one character’s treatise on the nature of postmodern art, this book is every bit as smart as it seems to think it is.
PIVOT leaves with a pretty open ending, setting itself up for sequels. This is hardly a complaint: PIVOT has plenty in it that would warrant further explanation, and the character of Jack is left sufficiently ambiguous where it’s clear her arc is not yet at an end. But sequels or no, it’s very easy to appreciate what Barlow did here.
PIVOT is an intelligent, beautifully written thriller filled with equal parts terror and bizarreness, but never forgetting that it has a heart far larger than it at first lets on.
Reviewed by Charles Baker for IndieReader.