T.C. Boyle’s twentieth novel, No Way Home, is an existential novel posing as a thriller. It has a noirish title, to be sure, and a male protagonist who’s dug himself a hole he’s found it harder and harder to climb out of. There’s a femme fatale, and a remote setting in the kind of place where you bury secrets, or bodies. A black hat emerges; blood spills. And Boyle’s language, an infinitely malleable thing that across a five-decade career has encompassed satire, social realism, and historical fiction, slots neatly into a genre that privileges darkness and pacing. Here he is early on, writing from the perspective of Terrence, a third-year medical student and the novel’s Guy in Trouble:
“He was an intimate of death. He knew it in all its guises, from toddlers poisoned by d-CON and oleander to teens crushed in the steel sheaths of their cars or overdosed on pills and the elderly in free fall through all the somatic systems that were no longer capable of propping them up.”
All bleakly crime-fiction-y enough. But Boyle is trying — if not entirely succeeding — at doing something trickier in this novel. The hats aren’t strictly black or white, the femme not as fatale as she seems, intentions and emotions vaguer and harder to tease out than in a more straightforward thriller. This is a thriller as informed as it is by Rashomon as it is by Don Winslow, with Boyle questioning his characters’ intentions not for the sake of a plot twist but for more disarming reasons: to suggest that our inherent ferality, our cruel animal nature, emerges regardless of the civilized narratives we use to define (and excuse) ourselves.
Consider Terrence, who is introduced first, in heroic framing. He’s a medical student, a life-saver, preparing for his boards while working at USC Hospital in Los Angeles. His mother has just died, which stokes our sympathies — here’s a life he can’t save, leaving him with a house outside Las Vegas abutting Lake Mead. While there to settle her affairs, he hooks up with Bethany, a hospital receptionist. Bethany proposes housesitting there while the paperwork is finalized. Terrence declines and heads back to LA, only to learn from a nosy neighbor that Bethany has moved in anyway, claiming she’s his fiancee.
Worse, Bethany has turned the home into the equivalent of a college party apartment, inviting a friend to swing by to give the family home an aroma of booze and weed. Jesse, Bethany’s ex-boyfriend, also hovers around, a menace in motorcycle leathers, making threats to both of them. What can Terry do but try to protect her? “She’s poison,” Jesse tells him. “You don’t know that yet, but you’re going to find out soon enough.”
This grim love-triangle/woman-in-trouble arrangement is bolstered by moments where Boyle conjures a sense that the entire world has gone toxic. Lake Mead is an ever-dwindling reservoir, a metaphor for a wider Southwest that is increasingly unsustainable. (A barmaid wears a T-shirt reading “Lake Mead, How Low Can It Go?”) Terrence cares for patients who seem beyond help and/or self-abnegating: A prisoner who smears his body in his own excrement, a homeless woman who has cerebrospinal fluid dripping from her sinuses. He lives in a world where human beings are constantly broken in foolish, tragic ways: A “shambling parade of accident victims and street people manifesting untreated diabetes, internal hemorrhaging, COVID, syphilis, knife wounds, bullets lodged in their ribs, thighs, hips, skulls.”
Inevitably, some of this damage heads Terrence’s way. Just as important, he delivers some damage of his own. On a walk near the house, Jesse knocks Terrence off a cliff, landing him in the hospital — though, luckily, without the permanent paralysis he’d feared. And naturally — truly, Boyle is playing with human-nature themes here — Terrence makes plans to exact his revenge.
Stories where a person is not what they seem and are in fact somebody else are the drivetrain of thrillers. In Boyle’s hands, though, the trope is a little more nuanced. Black hats don’t turn white, or vice versa; rather, everybody becomes a gray muddle. Bethany, it turns out, isn’t the scheming moocher or promiscuous tart that Terrence and Jesse dismiss her as; Terrence is more vicious than his medical degree might suggest. And Bethany has grown impatient with the hypermasculine, bloodthirsty men both have become: “You think you’re protecting me or something?” she says. “Or is this just some macho thing, a turf war, is that what it is, and my body’s the turf? As if I can’t make up my mind for myself?”
Bethany’s exasperation is persuasive; harder to believe is Jesse’s split personality. He’s a boozy, abusive man led by his libido, yet also a mild-mannered middle-school teacher with ambitions to write literary fiction. (As if to merge these two sentiments, he boinks his writing teacher.) Somewhat absurdly, Boyle tries to give Jesse an air of menace by noting he has a problem with taking edits: “He was a rule-breaker, creating something new, ahistorical, post-postmodern, couldn’t she see that?” Jesse’s duelling natures are hard enough to reconcile; stetting all queries is a flimsy symbol of lurking evil and murderous rebellion.
But psychological realism isn’t Boyle’s goal so much as a vivid portrait of decline. Entropy and ferality is Boyle’s business as a novelist; his grand theme is that we fail. It happens to great men (Frank Lloyd Wright in 2009’s The Women, Timothy Leary in 2019’s Outside Looking In), it happens in academia (2021’s Talk to Me), in hippie communes (2003’s Drop City) to the environment (stacks of Boyle novels, most recently 2023’s Blue Skies). And it happens to ordinary human beings. No Way Home most strongly evokes The Harder They Come (2015), which had at its center a schizophrenic self-declared mountain man who can’t conduct himself like a normal person in casual interactions, and turns violent in the end. His girlfriend could hardly stand it, but hey, the sex was good.
You can sense the gears grind in a similar fashion this time around. The premise of No Way Home gives Boyle plenty of raw material to work with: Casual misogyny, a dying town by a dying lake, an ER doc who’s seen plenty, motorcycles, sex. But setting the plot in motion requires Boyle to abandon his great gift of satire and humor for the sake of structure. What’s left are some ironic passages about how the world pretends it can fix us — give us a home, a job, the joys of a relationship, healthcare when we need it — but always lets us down. In one scene, Jesse is injured and helpless on the floor of his home as he watches a pharmaceutical ad showing “people of all ages dancing ecstatically in a field of wildflowers while a rapid-fire voice recited, ‘May cause temporary blindness, liver failure, stroke, internal bleeding, insomnia and suicidal ideation, consult your physician before using.’” It’s an easy joke, but classic Boyle: Trying to get better, he insists, always comes with nasty side effects.
[Published by Liveright on April 21, 2026, 320 pages; $29.99 hardcover]