"fear and big white eyes inside a suit of dirty skin"

(Chuck Wendig, Adam Nevill, Chris Power)

Friends,

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week…

---

The Book of Accidents - Chuck Wendig

When, where and why I bought it: with this month's audible credit. I've listened to a lot of highbrow literary fiction lately, and honestly I wanted something with a story. So when I saw the cover for this - which is right up my street - and read Wendig's wry Twitter blurb ("Haunted house. Hungry coal mine. A missing serial killer. And a family in danger.") I took a punt on it.

Wendig's also a reliably excellent Twitter presence, full of thoughtful writing advice, so I definitely bought this at least in part on the strength of his Twitter feed.

What it's about: it's about a nice suburban family that move to their dad's old house, despite the terrible experience he had there. Turns out things aren't as buried as he thought they were.

What it's really about: it's about how to deal with trauma, especially the kind of trauma that marks you for life, and how to overcome it (uh, I guess. I haven't finished it).

What it's like to read: pure, visceral enjoyment. Stephen Graham Jones has been comparing it to old-school Stephen King novels, but for once the comparison is accurate.

It's gripping - I've done more washing up lately, just because I wanted to keep listening - and massively entertaining. It’s also occasionally rather silly, in a distinctly King-ish sort of way (if you loved the sinister moving topiary in The Shining, then you're in for a treat here), and yet somehow the unlikeliness of certain events never once breaks the flow of the narrative.

It's not yet scary, not really, but it is consistently eerie. Highly recommended.

---

The Ritual - Adam Nevill

When, where and why I bought it: I bought this in a charity shop on a 3 for 99p deal, along with another Adam Nevill book whose pull-quote calls Nevill "Britain's answer to Stephen King".

The Ritual is one of the better known-horror novels of the past few years - they even made it into a film with Rafe Spall - but I'd held off on reading it before, because the reviews for it are decidedly mixed. Even so, 3 for 99p was a deal too good to resist. It's also the kind of thing that I should love - it's about people lost in the woods, and terrifying folk horror creatures that have been forgotten by civilised society.

What it's about: a bunch of friends who go hiking in Scandinavia and try to take a shortcut through some densely wooded forest. It does not end well. At all.

What's it really about? the horrors lurking off the beaten tracks - the darkness in the foundations of every modern culture.

What it's like to read: uneven. The initial sections, with a bunch of bickering friends in the woods, are enjoyable in a kind of Blair Witch Project way, emphasising the horror of being lost and damp. There's a good pulse of slow burning dread throughout, and some highly effective individual sequences (including one in a ruined woodland church, whose revelation made me squirm in the best possible way).

And yet I didn't love The Ritual. I didn't hate it, not at all, and I read through it in a couple of days, but I didn't love it. Part of that is because it feels a little too long. Part of that is a sense of unreality - the protagonist goes through multiple instances of extreme physical trauma in the book and yet still manages to survive.

And perhaps it's just too grim. It's pretty unrelenting, and it's bleak, and ultimately hopeless - and once that becomes clear, it's a lot less fun. Maybe that makes the novel a success, as Nevill's evoked that despair so vividly, but it's not exactly escapism.

---

A Lonely Man - Chris Power

Where, when and why I bought it: it was a birthday present (although I asked for it). I read Chris Power's short story collection Mothers last year - one of my very last pre-pandemic memories was sitting in a burger joint in Covent Garden in February 2020, reading Power's book after an intensely boring session of HR training - and it was just wonderful, a short story collection so good it won me round despite my lifelong dissatisfaction with short stories.

What it's about: it's about Robert Prowe, an author with some suspicious similarities to Chris Power, who meets another author in a book shop. His new friend, Patrick, recently ghostwrote a Russian oligarch's memoir, and now the Russian oligarch is dead and Patrick's apparently being followed. Prowe decides to steal Patrick's story.

What it's really about: it's about how you should never trust authors, as they'll steal details of your life and put them in a book. That, and the nature of fiction itself.

What it's like to read: disorientating. There are so many similarities between Power and Prowe that you'll quickly start asking yourself what is real. Did Chris Power actually meet an author called Patrick? Was he actually tailed by Russians?

That's all part of the novel's metafictional conceit, and it's a testament to Power's skill that it reads so easily. His descriptions are incredibly vivid, his prose luminous and precise, and so despite A Lonely Man's highbrow literary concerns, it never feels heavy.

Lots of reviewers have referenced le Carre (I'm not sure I agree - it felt more like Knausgaard) but it's a cut above your usual thriller, and worth your time if you want an uncommonly thoughtful beach read.