by Michael LaPointe

Whitney Chase is the culture writer for the New York publication The Bystander. She gets a taste for hard reporting in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and by a stroke of luck hits upon a story about a medical breakthrough with the potential to save millions of lives. But everything isn’t as it seems. As she investigates, discrepancies crop up in the data, researchers become increasingly evasive, and test subjects start disappearing. The Creep follows Whitney on her increasingly perilous quest to uncover the truth. The story is a well-crafted thriller. Though it occasionally ventures into unrealistic territory, it strikes me as being unrealistic to a purpose—dramatized truths taken to extremes to make LaPointe’s commentary on misinformation and greed more apparent. And both plot and immersion never suffer significantly from it. What results is a story that’s at times uncomfortable, at times sad, but one that kept me captivated to the end.

originally published in The Walleye, September 2021