It's very suspenseful; is a Vietnam vet story and two kinds of thriller story; but puts its punch into describing fear, not violence itself.
The Okanagan University College defines, among other terms of art,
CATHARSIS: In Aristotle's poetics, the purgation of the emotions, as if exposure to an affective work of art could cure imbalance of the passions or psychological distress. There has always been debate as to whether this was what Aristotle actually had in mind. In any case, the idea crops up frequently in subsequent expression theory and the like.I remembered an simpler comparison: that catharsis presents us with images of what we fear, and cathexis with images of what we want. I often feel that works about violence think of their presentation of violence as cathartic, but frame the presentation of the violence as though they were cathectic (sp?). I'm pretty squeamish, so it doesn't take much good camerawork to set this off in me; I stopped watching Buffy somewhere in the second season because it was making me feel icky. (Did cover 'feel icky' in the Poetics?)
CATHEXIS: A Freudian term designating the investment of libidinal energy (see fetish, libido) in an idea, image, object or person. Critics fond of discerning appetitive drives in a work of art might be inclined to make use of the concept.
No icky from Laurie King, despite a string of fascinatingly-horrible subjects.