Number 8 - Grace - Alex Pheby

 

As regular readers may or may not recall, I read Mordew late last year and was mostly enthusiastic about it. On the strength of that book, I ordered a couple from his back catalogue including this, his first novel.

If it didn't say on the back cover that this was his debut I would never ever have guessed. This is astonishingly good. I have loved pretty much every page of this book.

An escapee from a secure hospital is injured and taken in by an old woman and her granddaughter in their house in the middle of the forest. The relationship between the three of them grows into a strange family dynamic as he recovers. However, the idyll that develops is only temporary and he has to leave and take the girl to the city where danger lies in wait.

Other than the name of the secure hospital, no place names are ever given for the main thrust of the story.  The city is only ever referred to as The City. Likewise the timeframe of the story is uncertain, probably late 90s given the backstory for the old woman. There is no identifiable technology for any given era in the story.

This lack of identifiable time and place lends a timeless quality to the story. It places everything on the edge of our reality and adds to the vague surrealism that occurs throughout.  There's a strange link between this and Mordew in that the name Anaximander appears in both. I'm wondering if this is deliberate or coincidental.

I would struggle to place this in any genre since it has elements of at least four totally disparate ones. And it does it in style.

The writing is of a uniformly high standard throughout. Although the broad strokes of the story might be predictable, the minutiae of plot details are extremely unpredictable. Pheby doesn't follow any conventional path through the story, particularly in the later chapters. He allows a lot to happen off camera that some readers would prefer to be told direct. But this reader here loved the approach.

Alex Pheby has shot straight to the upper tiers of my must read authors list. This is a remarkable book in every aspect. I slowed my reading near the end because I wanted to delay putting the book down for the last time despite the tension inherent to the story. It's very rare that happens to me. 

Get hold of a copy and read it if you like your writing intelligent and compelling. I can't recommend this highly enough.