Antiheroes are in right now. Maybe you’ve heard something about it. Be they grandly tragic megalo-masterminds done in by too clever hubris, penny-ante fuck-ups suddenly thrust in for a pound by cruel circumstance, or lovably hangdog born losers hustling hard toward that big score in the sky, there exists a long and storied antihero tradition in American literature, film, and television – one that, if you were to step back and connect its disparate dots with red string like some dishonorably discharged corrupt cop working obsessively outside the law, would undoubtedly coalesce into a cottage-industrial extended universe to rival any other subcategory of hero in the popular canon (be they blue collar, action, or most recently, super-).
And yet, even within this larger milieu of established antihero tropes, Mike Wickham – the protagonist of Jesse Hilson’s excellent debut novel Blood Trip – stands out as just a little bit more anti- than usual. By turns righteously aggrieved and self-loathing; clueless and agonizingly self-aware, Mike doesn’t fit neatly into any of the aforementioned categories, at least in part because, from one spiraling moment to the next, he quite fairly sees himself in all of them. Perpetually assured that he’s the smartest guy in any given room, while simultaneously admonishing himself for the dire straits those same smarts have wrought, he embodies both the fast-talking con man, and the doomed mark – the antihero who’s only ever fooling himself.
The setup is a familiar one: resentful ex-husband puts a convoluted plan in motion to off his ex-wife’s new man (this time via a fake kidnapping of his teenage daughter – ostensibly the only person in the book for whom he feels anything but contempt), only for shit to get real in ways he was both wholly unprepared for, and is subsequently powerless to stop. From the naïve aegis of his suburban superiority complex, Mike bets everything he holds dear against his ability to make it hold him back, blinded by his own certainty that he is in control. The immediacy with which he begins to make mistakes, however, is almost laughable (indeed, even if his plan had worked to perfection, Hilson includes a sly wink to Mike’s impending downfall before anything even goes wrong – the fact that he cancels his daughter’s phone service to keep her from contacting her mother or stepfather while her “kidnapping” is still in progress, and never once considers that this act of cellular sabotage could – and would – be traced back to him, is just the first in a double-decker chalkboard’s worth of exponentially mounting miscalculations).
Though the criminals with whom Mike has involved himself are hardly mental heavyweights, they turn the tables on him faster than a Real New Jersey Housewife, but even with his family now in legitimate danger, his tumorous ego won’t allow him to let go. On some level, he still thinks he can pull it all off. Though other characters receive dedicated chapters as various story threads develop, Mike is the only first-person narrator in the book, and his mind is a truly unpleasant one to be inside. Hilson’s grasp of his deep-seated toxicity – from his dismissive refusal to believe a female detective could possibly catch up to his scheme gone awry, to the blithe ease with which he ping-pongs between daydreaming about his ex-wife suffering violence at the hands of her kidnappers, and himself heroically saving her from that same violence – is as deft and natural as it is uncomfortably relatable. Furthermore, the way in which the compound Joro web of lies he just can’t seem to stop spinning only serves to further enmesh him within their poisonously sticky center belies both an authorial empathy for that certain class of hapless, hardboiled schmucks who never quite realize they’re serving plots they know nothing about – plots that are decidedly never serving them – as well as a robust and sophisticated knowledge of the noir genre in general.
All of which is to say, it takes both know-how, and guts, to write an antihero like Mike Wickham. Neither a Tarantinoesque, shoot-from-the-ultrahip criminista, nor a Vince Gilligan-style underworld underdog made good (or bad), if Mike has a preexisting cognate, it’s probably the fortuneless fools that populate the darker half of the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre. Think Jerry Lundegaard in FARGO, or Ed Crane in THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE. Not evil guys, necessarily— just unlikable guys. Angry guys. Weak guys. Guys no one has ever rooted for – and who you won’t really want to root for either – but whose fate as morbidly fascinating cautionary tales seems all but written in the stars. Mike may script his inner monologue like a soulless Jim Thompson terror, but by the time he’s accidentally locking his keys in a car full of ransom money – a capital-B Basic screw-up Hilson plays to hilarious effect – it’s more than clear that he’s simply not equipped to back up the vengeful rage he carries inside.
Likewise, the closing chapter – which reveals just how tough Mike is when his back’s against the wall, and just where, exactly, he’s telling his sad sack story from – lets the reader in on a plainer, simpler truth: more often than not, the antihero fantasy is simply that – a fantasy. It’s not about making anything better. It’s just about making things different. About taking back a sense of control. But even the most successful criminals tend to lose control in the end, and nine times out of ten – Hell, ninety-nine times out of a hundred – your average joe with an axe to grind is gonna look a lot less like Walter White, and a lot more like Mike. He’s not an easy guy to read, and I’m sure he wasn’t easy to write, but what makes him so difficult to root for is also what makes him ring true. There is a Mike lurking in most men, if they’re willing to feed it; if enough people call them a monster that they start to believe they could be one; if they’ve been pushed far enough to feel justified. More than anything, it’s the warring duality of that mindset that makes Hilson’s characterization so brilliant, and whether you wind up feeling more empathy for Mike than I do or not, watching him sweat out his many hapless, failed attempts to break bad makes for one hell of a Blood Trip.
-Dave Fitzgerald
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