Number 21 - Inspection by Josh Malerman

Some authors automatically bypass my entire TBR pile completely when they put out a new book.  Since reading Bird Box two years ago, Josh Malerman has been one of those. This is my third Josh Malerman read of the year - and not the last.  His follow on to Bird Box is due out in a few months and I can't wait.

The only review I'd seen of this book online wasn't the most enthusiastic I've ever seen.  But it was reviewing this book as if it was a full-pelt, pedal-to-the-metal, all-out horror novel (Like Bird box and On This The Day of the Pig were). And that is why they were lukewarm about it IMHO.

If you were to review The wizard of Oz as if it was a western - after all it opens and closes on a ranch in western America -  you'd say it was a piss poor western.  Review it as the fantasy novel/film it actually is and it's superlative.

This book is a diffeent beast from JM's pure horror novels. Like Unbury Carol, it defies easy pigeonholing.  It contains horror elements, that is for definite. But it also contains elements of science fiction, some fantastic elements.  It could even be read as a mega twisted crime novel, about abduction, incarceration and murder of children and adults.

The basic story - the Alphabet Boys live in a tower in the middle of nowhere. They have been deliberately kept separate from society, and particularly from the opposite sex. They are being raised as prodigies and geniuses, schooled in the arts and the sciences to superlative heights. A few miles through the woods is a similar tower containing the Letter Girls.  All this is part of an inhuman experiment. When J from the Alphabet Boys meets K from the Letter girls.... all hell breaks loose.

The style of writing is the usual efficient and atmospheric prose I've come to expect from Mr Malerman. There's a clinical effectiveness in this book which truly suits the subject matter. The world building is excellent.  The drip feed of information in the opening chapters is very skillfully done and the enclosed world of J and his twenty three surving brothers feels entirely real by the end of chapter 3.

The tension builds nicely throughout as the children discover more and more. As the most developed of the adults, Warren/Laurence and Richard are great characters. The guilt of one and the megalomania of the other shine through the pages and set up a nice rivalry at the heart of the story, but not one that pans out in any predictable form. 

In any good thriller - because that's a category this could also fall into - there should be THAT point in the story.  THAT page you get to where THAT happens and you know you will finish this book in this sitting regardless of how many pages are left, or what time of day it is.  In this book, THAT occurs about 100 pages from the end, and I can honestly say that if I was a heart surgeon with a fully prepped patient on the table who'd just been opened by my assistant, waiting for me to perform the most complex part of the surgery, I would have told them to hold on for a while and I'd be with them after  I finished the book.

You can take two things from that.  Number 1 - when THAT happens in this book, it really is bloody effective and this book is a page turner of immense quality.  Number 2 - heart surgery should not be on my list of career choices, I am a horrible person with poor prioritisation skills.

Slight spoiler ahead.

It's not an absolutely perfect book. There is a basic flaw at the heart of the story, but that same basic flaw applies to Lord of the Flies (one of my favourite novels of all time). I once heard William Golding talking about the reason there were no girls on the island.  It was so that "sex wouldn't rear its ugly head".  Even at age 15 when I heard him say that, I did wonder if he'd heard of the different variations in sexuality.

Removing the opposite sex is not going to remove the distractions inherent in the "delicate years", it could just switch it into a same sex distraction. It may not even be a switch. However, in this book I chose to ignore this as just an (extreme) oversight on the part of D.A.D. and M.O.M..

Theoretically the Burt papers could have referenced the possibility, and it wouldn't have felt like a plot hole. However, it didn't impact on my enjoyment of the book in the slightest.    

If you're going to have a narrative flaw, it might as well be one shared with one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

This is available from alll good book shops, quite a few bad bookshops and anywhere online that sells books, so you have no excuse to ignore my advice and go out and buy this now.

An easy 8.5/10 - read it.