Kill Your Darling

De: Clay McLeod Chapman

Narrado por: Sean Patrick Hopkins

The body of Glenn Partridge’s 15-year-old son was discovered in a vacant lot nearly forty years ago. The police are still no closer to finding the murderer decades later.

Glenn refuses to let the memory of his son fade—or let anyone else within this small working-class community forget. His long-suffering wife signs him up for an amateur fiction-writing workshop at the local library, just to get him out of the house and out of his own head.

Rule number one: Write what you know—so Glenn decides to share his son’s story. The class offers him a chance to make sense of a senseless crime and find the fictional closure life never provided. But as Glenn’s story takes on a life of its own, someone from the past is compelled to come out of hiding before he reaches… the end.

©2024 Clay McLeod Chapman (P)2025 Clay McLeod Chapman

What Happens When Grief is All You Have?

"Why wait when we can suffer for our own sins right here and now?"

Life is full of unanswered questions and, as a result, we humans cope with our imaginations. How can we make this task easier? We create new tools. Is there life on other planets? We create space programs. What happens to us when we die? We create religion.

But what happens when that unanswered question concerns your loved one’s unsolved death by another’s hand? For Glenn Partridge in Clay McLeod Chapman’s novella, KILL YOUR DARLING, it means an imagination that fuels an endless obsession.

“We’re supposed to mourn our deceased loved ones — but what happens when grief is all you have, when grief becomes addictive, turns toxic, downright poisonous?”

The human mind is a powerful weapon for both good and bad. It’s a friend but also an enemy. And aging can alter it into either one. Without answers…without closure…one can feel left in a void that sucks everything out of life except for the unanswered question. Now, imagine 40 years of that torture and you have a better understanding of what our protagonist is going through, and why, in his case, the human mind turns to the darker side of things.

Glenn and Carol Partridge are an elderly couple in their 70s whose son, Billy, was murdered more than 40 years prior. His body was found in an empty lot with his face wrapped in duct-tape and decorated with crude black markings. No suspects, no leads, cold case. But not for Glenn. The need for answers – closure – still burns within him. He sees what he believes are new clues every day pointing to possible outcomes. As Glenn puts it, “I have a responsibility to my son.” He still calls the police every day for any leads they may have and then offers them his new ideas and possibilities as they patronize him in return.

Both husband and wife attempt to live a normal life as Carol’s body and Glenn’s mind breakdown with age, but the sadness persists; they remain haunted by the loss of their son. Every day, Glenn conjures up images and feelings of what he believes Billy’s death experience must have been like in disturbing detail. As he obsesses, his wife Carol has her own way of keeping Billy alive: she leaves an extra plate out for dinner every night while also visiting Billy’s bedroom (what Glenn calls “The Museum of Billy”) that has been well-preserved in the exact same way he left it on that fateful day when he never returned home.

Carol signs Glenn up for a creative writing course led by a local fledgling author, hoping it will lead Glenn out of his obsession and into a better mental space, but she learns she couldn’t have been more wrong. Thus, Glenn begins writing “The Book of Billy” which deepens his obsession to the brink of madness until he finally confronts the truth that has eluded him for decades…or does he?

"The sentences we serve, the punishments we perform, are our own form of hell."

Heavy. That might be the best way to describe Chapman’s novella and its audiobook counterpart performed by narrator Sean Patrick Hopkins. This is not a fun beach read, or a leisurely stroll listen -- this is heavy stuff. That’s not to say anything negative about Chapman’s writing or Hopkins’ performance because both are done exceptionally well. No, this is a heavy story about loss, grief, obsession, and aging by those left behind. As heavy as the burden Glenn carries on his shoulders.

Chapman gives us a first-person narrative through the suffering Glenn, a man whose life is unraveling like the duct tape which wrapped his son to death. This loss leads to grief that will not go away because of the unsolved case, a nonstop flowing river of long-term misery. This grief becomes obsession to find the truth which Glenn believes will bring justice and peace to his family. Yet, when this search for the truth becomes a way of living for 40 plus years, the obsession has become life itself that no answer, truth or otherwise, would satiate. Glenn is a prisoner of his own making and we’re bunking with him throughout this story. Think of how a person who has spent most of their life in a prison system is finally paroled and doesn’t know how to function in the outside world, so they commit more crimes just to return to the place they’ve called home for all those years. Chapman also gives us glimpses into how Glenn may be an unreliable narrator as some of his memories could be fantasy and some as a result of his advanced age. As time moves on and our mental facilities regresses, our memories become affected by the change. At first, it’s the small details that go missing, replaced by manufactured ones, then come the bigger details and, before we know it, we’re telling ourselves completely different stories to believe. The story has been altered with a different meaning, one that placates us much better than the real one ever did.

For instance, there are moments in this story revealing Glenn may have never really known his son, whether it was the music he liked, the books he read, or the people he called friends. Instead, Glenn’s created a version of his son that is a perpetual victim, an innocent, a good guy – the result of a dark maze of possibilities and projections based more on what Glenn may have wanted to believe rather than the inconvenient truths that life is notorious for providing.

“A book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.”

Chapman wrote a couple of scenes that left an impression on this reader, mostly taking place at the writing workshop, a setting which Chapman is no doubt very familiar with in life.

There’s a scene where our instructor Brooke Jennings rambles to the class, but it’s consistently interrupted by Glenn’s obsessive inner thoughts, particularly those about Billy’s murder. Very effective in the head space. Or the scene where Glenn confronts Jennings in the parking lot when the latter suggests Glenn creates his own ending since he can’t find one in the real world. Or the confrontation between Glenn and fellow workshop attendee Siobhan when discussing each other’s stories. Tension abounds like suffocating duct tape.

While I did think the story could have been shorter and more taut (sorry Billy!), it still delivered on the emotional front in its novella format.

“The truth is there for those foolish enough to find it.”

Sean Patrick Hopkins performed as the nearly 80-year old Glenn without the stereotypical geriatric sound. Instead, Hopkins focused on the quality of the character through Glenn’s grief, anger, and overwhelming burden. A real human, aged, still made of flesh and blood, forever obsessed in finding who killed his son.

One particular moment that stuck with me: Hopkins as Glenn describing what he wanted out of each passing decade – revenge, justice, answers, and an end. You could hear those 40 years of torture in the performance itself. That’s powerful storytelling through audiobook narration courtesy of Hopkins.

"There’s no justice. There has never been justice. The guilty go free. The innocent suffer. The wicked live. This story goes on unfinished, untold."

This is a tough one to sit through because of the nature of the story, but if you’re into grief horror, or something I’d rather describe as a grief psychological crime story, then you’ll enjoy this one even more. And even if you aren’t into those, both Chapman’s prose and Hopkin’s performance are well worth your time.

Your attention to details

Nothing always amazing . Never a bad book .ty for creating books for me to paint to . Ty

Phenomenal Narration For a Phenomenal Story!

When I was offered the chance to listen to this brilliant book on audio, I jumped at it!

I don't envy the task set before Sean Patrick Hopkins in voicing this grief-based piece of horror fiction.

A first person narrative from the point-of-view of the father of a murdered son has to be a daunting task. I'm here to tell you, he pulled it off and he made it look, (sound?), easy!

As you can imagine, this isn't a happy story but it's a compelling one. As this elderly man faces his own impending demise, he attempts to finally come to terms with his son's unsolved murder. Does he ultimately do that? You'll have to listen to it to find out and I strongly urge you to do just that!

My highest recommendation!

*ARC from narrator

Terrific Narration Brings Home The Grief

Fresh off his work as an ethereal voice on the other end of a disconnected phone in Stay on the Line, Sean Patrick Hopkins returns to narrate the hell out of another grief-laden horror novella from Clay McLeod Chapman in Kill Your Darling.

Glenn Partridge and wife lost their 15-year-old son to a brutal murderer 40 years ago. It’s a wound that won’t heal, can never heal. Glenn’s wife signs him up for a community writing workshop in the hopes that it’ll help get him a hobby, and get him out of her hair for a little while. Rather than distract him from the obsession of his son’s death, Glenn finds it an opportunity to tell their story, or, perhaps more importantly, to tell Billy’s story. Billy’s murder has been a cold case long enough for a long line of detectives to have retired and die, none of them ever getting any closer to solving the mystery. In telling Billy’s story and unraveling the past, Glenn hopes to find answers, but does he really want the truth?

Chapman is a hell of a writer. His words come from the gut as much as they do the heart, and he’s content to use them as knives to stab at readers with an assassin’s precision. Glenn’s in his 80s. His son has been dead longer than he ever had a chance to live, but his murder took away Glenn’s life, too. The man has gotten old, but it’s been a long, slow death since losing Billy. Whatever is left of him exists only in the hopes that there might be some resolution, some bit of closure. He calls the police daily asking if there’s been any new leads while studying the last shirt his son ever wore in the hopes of scrying a blood stain the forensics team missed all those years ago. He maintains a photo album documenting every inch Billy’s too-short 15 years. He’s given over his existence to become an eternal flame in tribute to Billy. He’s married, but it’s his dead boy that defines him.

Hopkins captures this all perfectly in his reading of Chapman’s material. There’s a rough hollowness to the words spoken that echo Glenn’s loss. We feel the grief, the emptiness, the anger, leeching into Hopkins performance throughout, and the ways hope compete against hopelessness. It’s an emphatic and, more importantly, empathetic reading.

Kill Your Darling forgoes the supernatural in favor of those all-too-personal real-life horrors. The horror of loss, of the brutal murder of a child whose head was encased in a mask of duct tape and suffocated, the horror of never knowing why it happened or who did it. There are no made-up monsters, no vampires or zombies to explain it all away for us. It’s all human, the kind of horrors Chad Lutzke or Jack Ketchum largely wrote about in their too-recognizable monsters that live next door. It’s the kind of horror Clint Eastwood might have adapted to film, starring and directing in between talking to an empty chair at conventions for fascists, back when he was riding high on Gran Torino or Mystic River, if only this book had come out 20 years ago. It’s the kind of horror that’s scary because of how realistic it is, rooted so firmly as it is in the possibility of loss and tragedy and the ease with which one can lose themselves to grief.

Grief Begets Obsession Begets Insanity

When grief begets obsession begets insanity, how do you ever crawl back into the skin which was once yours… or can you?