"It's a luscious mix of words and tricks
That let us bet when you know we should fold..."
--The Shins, "Caring is Creepy"
Boy meets girl, boy loses grip on reality, boy punches his sergeant, goes AWOL from Army, hides in a storage space behind girl’s closet in her Georgia home where she keeps him fed and naked, taking comfort in her secreted-away houseguest and their Stockholm syndromic predicament and cozy but off-kilter relationship.
Settling down has never been so unsettling, a notion that – as reiterated in David Zimmerman’s enticing but disquieting Caring is Creepy – suggests the persuasiveness and “luscious mix of words and tricks” seemingly applicable to “the girl” at issue, 15-year-old Lynn Marie Sugrue. In initial league with her comrade-in-harm, her friend Dani, Lynn transforms a persuasive lark of an online chat with the “boy” she meets, a disaffected soldier 10 years her senior named Logan Loy. All in all, it makes for an insidious and deceiving but often sweet summertime ensnarement that is alternatively tangled web and tender trap.
Meanwhile, others “bet when you know we should fold” as an eventful parallel subplot — whose actions speaks as loud as the wordy psychological give and take of the Lynn and Logan saga — constitutes a complement to the two main characters’ interpersonal relationship and their escalating emotional and mental tensions, including Logan’s downward spiral. In havoc-wreaking recklessness, Lynn’s mother, a hospital nurse, has unwittingly gotten mixed up with some shady characters and situations when her boyfriend Hayes doles out some underhanded runarounds and empty promises to some thugish partners in crime. Unfortunately, all escape routes are blocked, and while these developments seem not to touch upon the account of our hostess and her houseguest-turned-hostage, there are troubling implications for Lynn.
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