I can’t say that I enjoyed Nathan Oates’s A Flaw in the Design (Serpent’s Tail), but I certainly read it at speed in a state of high stress and anxiety, as the tension built inexorably and I began to feel just as haunted (hunted?) as the author’s protagonist. Gil is a creative writing teacher at a university in rural Vermont, happily married with two daughters. He has been estranged from his sister for years, having found her son, Matthew, looking on while his daughter struggled to surface in a swimming pool. His sister and her husband have since died in a car crash, and Matthew, now 17, has come to live with Gil, Molly and their daughters.
While the women of his family appear to forgive the past and take Matthew at face value, Gil is convinced there is something evil in the teenager: that he is taunting his uncle – and that something dreadful lies ahead. He watches for “those small moments, carefully hidden for the most part, when Matthew’s true self peeked out”; he watches him talk to his daughter, waiting for Matthew to hit her, but all he does is pour a glass of water “as if he was just a thirsty teen, an orphaned kid, and not at all what even now Gil saw in him: a terrible, violent monster, waiting patiently for the moment to strike”. It’s all horribly claustrophobic, in the best possible way, as Gil starts to dig into Matthew’s past and present while his own behaviour becomes more unstable.
