It's not a big surprise to find a serial killer in a prison, since that's where they usually wind up when apprehended. But in Willow Rose's novella, Eenie, Meenie, the killer doesn't appear to be one of the inmates at a Danish juvenile detention center, but, rather, someone who has free access to the various cells at night. However, while Rose's premise is intriguing, here execution is anything but, and the story becomes a confusing mess well before the final reveal.
The villain in Eenie, Meenie selects his victims seemingly at random (the title refers to the old counting game in which the villain engages by counting cells until he selects the victim of the night). And, in fairness, the villain apparently isn’t always a killer because, instead of murdering his victims, he mutilates them instead in ways that will render them incapable of repeating their earlier crimes. So, a rapist is castrated, and other victims are blinded or have their fingers cut off. Needless to say, this is not a story for the squeamish. And, even further needless to say, as the attacks continue, the remaining boys in the facility don’t take it very well.
About one third of Eenie, Meenie details the various assaults, while the other two thirds reads pretty much like a standard prison story. Johnny, an older boy who has been incarcerated twice previously, winds up back in the detention center and soon becomes leader of a group of inmates loyal to him. That puts him in conflict with one of the other established gangs and with the warden, who wants to stop Johnny from fomenting trouble.
While Eenie, Meenie has potential to be two different interesting crime thrillers, it succeeds at neither. Author Rose’s story telling here just isn’t very coherent. The story is fairly short (the book lists at 95 pages on Amazon but almost half of that is an excerpt from one of the author’s other works), and it simply isn’t long enough to adequately tell a story this complicated. A number of characters are introduced, some of them later to become victims of the unknown mutilator, but their positions in the inmate hierarchy are unclear, and Rose’s attempts to establish character are rather haphazard. As a result, I wasn’t really sure who the various victims were, nor did I really care.
I admit I have no knowledge of the Danish penal system, but Eenie, Meenie wasn’t very edifying in that regard. I don’t expect a fictional work to be a textbook on the subject, but the prison setting never really came alive, and I had a really hard time accepting a violent psychopath just wandering the corridors at night without being detected. My gut feel was that the author had done rather minimal research, if any, on the subject before writing the book.
Eenie, Meenie has the basis for a really good thriller, but this rather brief, confusing story doesn’t accomplish much other than to provide readers with a couple of graphically compelling torture porn dismemberment scenes. For those into that form of horror, the story delivers the goods in those scenes, but the rest of the book misses the mark. Instead of a compelling thriller, it’s merely a “teenie weenie” story.