The only problem is, she doesn’t twist hard enough. Danny Miller is a wonderfully creepy character who quickly invades Seymour’s life on the pretext of talking things over and straightening out the past. He gets even scarier once Seymour begins to understand how maniacally clever Miller is at manipulating people. The “really devilish thing,” according to one old acquaintance, was that “Danny wasn’t breaking the rules.” He got the people trying to help him to do that for him. “He was very good at getting people to step across that invisible border.” So far so good, and “Border Crossing” is a good book. But not great, because Barker is too much the proper novelist concerned with form and subtlety to ever let this psychological thriller off the leash. Perhaps if it had been more like a made-for-TV movie, it would have been an even better book.
