I was really excited about the premise of this book - the Smiley Face/Jack Daniels killer being investigated by a therapist and his sort-of patient; a therapist with a dark past in the Satanic ritual abuse repressed-memory craze of the 1970s that led to the incarceration (and subsequent release) of his foster brother; a disaffected, heroin-addled teenager struggling to make sense of his place in the world . . . and it definitely was a compelling novel, I'll give it that. I had a hard time putting it down. But so many of the characters seemed to be just the rough edges of a person rather than a fully-formed, considered human being. 
 Some of Chaon's choices with the text are interesting - some odd spacing here and there, a couple of chapters appearing as columns with narratives that parallel, converge, diverge - but I'm not sure to what purpose. The only thing I can really guess is that he was trying to evoke something along the lines of muddled memories? But mostly all it did was make me flip pages and skim columns, trying to see which things connected where. 
 I enjoyed the process of reading this book, but I wasn't especially satisfied by the way it wrapped up.