A well-heeled Wall Streeter, generally considered a good guy, agrees to throw a bachelor party at his suburban Westchester house for his slightly sleazy younger brother. With his wife and daughter in the city for the night, he allows — despite his own uneasiness — strippers at the bash.
This will not end well.
But we can‘t predict just what a disastrous turn the party will take. Within the first few pages of “The Guest Room,” the latest novel by prolific author Chris Bohjalian, the booze-fueled bacchanalia that began as the fulfillment of men’s fantasies turns into a Helter-Skelter-like nightmare.
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| “The Guest Room” by Chris Bohjalian (Doubleday) |
Two Russian bodyguards are dead. Two strippers are on the lam in an Escalade. The partiers are left staring in wide-eyed disbelief at a widening pool of blood that is soaking into the beige brocade couch, spattering the wallpaper and dripping down a semi-valuable painting of the Hudson.
Bohjalian, whose books often explore the contrast between surface lightness and the darkness that lies below, takes on upper-middle class America in this novel, ripping apart any illusion of safety or moral high ground in a headlong collision between the comforting rituals of suburbia and the viciousness of the Russian mob.
The two young women — or are they girls? — are sex slaves, the men later learn, as the implications of the night sink in. Kidnapped in Russia as young teens and brought to the U.S. illegally, they were captives, forced into prostitution. (TNS)
