“I’m capable of anything I need to be capable of.” – Pike
Pike, the novel’s eponymous main character, is not a good person. Never was. Be it running drugs and people across the border, beating his wife, going down the rabbit hole of drug and alcohol addiction, or committing murder, Pike’s past is a bleak portrait of a squandered, meaningless life. And he knows it.
While he’s nowhere near at peace with the brutalities he committed as a younger man, with age he’s removed himself from that destructive and criminal lifestyle, finally reaching a point where he can tolerate himself. Mostly. At least he could, until one of the more shameful truths of his past is thrust upon him, quite literally, in the form of a twelve-year-old granddaughter, Wendy, he didn’t even know he had.
Of course that’s not really a surprise considering he hadn’t seen his own daughter in decades, not since his wife, finally fed up with the beatings, ushered him out of the house and their lives via the claw end of a hammer. Turns out his daughter ended up as a heroin addict, turning tricks to support her habit. When the result of her chasing one too many dragons is an overdose, Pike finds himself the only one left to take care of Wendy.
So this is where the book turns around, where Pike bonds with Wendy and is redeemed by doing right by his granddaughter in a way he failed to do with his own daughter, right? Not quite. (more…)
