Surprise, surprise. I thought I was beyond the ability to be frightened or nightmare-inspired by supernatural horror, having read the genre for nearly 60 years at a frequency ranging from intermittent (recently) to periodic (the 1950s to the 1990s). Well, my encounter with THE ONLY CHILD by Andrew Pyper has left me with three nights and counting of sleep disturbances of the dream-induced kind, and they haven’t been populated by sugarplum fairies either.

THE ONLY CHILD is narrated, for the most part, in the first person present voice of Dr. Lily Dominick, a forensic psychiatrist at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York. The Kirby is a maximum-security hospital that houses patients who have been charged with violent criminal offenses (the staff is urged to refer to them as “clients”). Lily is tasked with providing psychiatric evaluations of the Center’s clients, as opposed to attempting to treat them. The reader learns early on that Lily had a very turbulent childhood. She has no clear memory of her father other than a name and a photograph; she was also quite young when her mother was brutally murdered in front of her in what was described as an attack by a wild animal.

"It is a story that is not for the fainthearted and cleverly combines literary history with contemporary life. Read it, and be prepared to forgive yourself if you decide afterward that you will never again make or trust a new friend."

Lily, who is 36 in the story’s present, refers to herself as “petite,” a non-social person who buries herself in her work while essentially eschewing social contact for the most part. Her life changes when she interviews a deeply disturbing patient who has committed a remarkably violent crime against a stranger. The patient --- a man who appears to be about Lily’s age --- says that he carried out this horrific act so he could meet her and tell her several other things. He knows many personal bits of information about her, items that he could have learned with a couple of decent internet searches. But he also alleges that he is over 200 years old and is Lily’s father.

Lily is unsettled after the consultation, but the relatively short encounter is only the beginning of a sequence of events that change her life irrevocably and forever. The patient escapes the confines of the Kirby and commits a number of violent acts, interspersed with a series of correspondences to Lily in which he reveals that he was originally named Peter Farkas but now calls himself Michael, after the warrior angel.

Inexplicably drawn to the madman (for what else can she call him?), Lily follows him based on some enigmatic clues and hints to a variety of places around the world, even as they are pursued by a mysterious group of individuals who profess that they want to save Lily and study Michael. Or do they? Can they be trusted? And what is Michael’s real intent? Can any of what he says --- from his origin to his alleged relationship with Lily --- be true? And what if it is? The answers to those questions lead to a conclusion that you won’t see coming.

Consider all of the above, and you will surmise that I loved every word of THE ONLY CHILD, from its disturbing flashback beginning to its ironic ending. You would be absolutely correct. It is a story that is not for the fainthearted and cleverly combines literary history with contemporary life. Read it, and be prepared to forgive yourself if you decide afterward that you will never again make or trust a new friend.