The Boy

In 1959 Ray and Daisy Cook and their five children were brutally slain in their modest home in the central Alberta town of Stettler. Robert Raymond Cook, Ray Cooks son from his first marriage, was convicted of the crime, and had the infamy of becoming the last man hanged in Alberta. Forty-six years later, a troublesome character named Louise in a story that Betty Jane Hegerat finds herself inexplicably reluctant to write, becomes entangled in the childhood memory of hearing about that gruesome mass murder. Through four years of obsessively tracking the demise of the Cook family, and dancing around the fate of the fictional family, the problem that will not go away is how to bring the story to the page. A work of non-fiction about the Cooks and their infamous son, or a novel about Louise and her problem stepson? Both stories keep coming back to the boy. Part memoir, part investigation, part novella, part writers journal, The Boy, is the authors final capitulation to telling the story with all of the troublesome questions unanswered. 'As Betty Jane Hegerat struggles with a new piece of fiction, she recalls an infamous murder case that shares many similarities with the story she is proposing to write. Fifty years after the trial of Robert Raymond Cook, Hegerat re-examines the evidence from the grisly crime for which the accused received the death penalty. She is both repulsed and intrigued. Did Cook commit the murders? And, if so, what possessed the young man to murder his entire family - his father, stepmother and half-siblings? In The Boy Hegerat's fiction and Cook's story become entwined. The author and her narrator engage in a dialogue that explores what drives a young boy to murder, and what ultimately constitutes reality and fiction.'--P. [4] of cover. "As Betty Jane Hegerat struggles with a new piece of fiction, she recalls an infamous murder case that shares many similarities with the story she is proposing to write. Fifty years after the trial of Robert Raymond Cook, Hegerat re-examines the evidence from the grisly crime for which the accused received the death penalty. She is both repulsed and intrigued. Did Cook commit the murders? And, if so, what possessed the young man to murder his entire family - his father, stepmother and half-siblings? In The Boy Hegerat's fiction and Cook's story become entwined. The author and her narrator engage in a dialogue that explores what drives a young boy to murder, and what ultimately constitutes reality and fiction."--Page 4 of cover