He's such a well-respected author in the field, what could go wrong?
Sadly, this choice of book did. I hope it's one of his lesser works, because I didn't find much to enjoy in this at all. The story starts when Tim Underhill, a writer of horror fiction, visits his brother for the sad occasion of his sister-in-law's funeral after her sudden death.
There are a number of disappearances happening in the town. Teenaged boys have been vanishing, never to be seen again.
Eight days after the funeral, Tim's nephew Mark joins the list of the missing.
This has the potential to be a good story, but I found the pacing, the structure and the plotting let the whole thing down.
It hops randomly through the timeline. I normally don't mind a bit of back and forwards, but it needs to make sense to the storytelling. This starts with Tim travelling back to his old hometown, a couple of chapters in, it jumps in mid chapter, via Tim's journal, to 9 days later where he's travelling back to the town after receiving news of Mark's disappearance. The next chapter, we're back at the funeral of the SIL. A few chapters later, we're following Mark in the week before his mother's death. then it's the day before his mother's death mid chapter, then in the next chapter we're back to a week before her death.
When it settles down, we get what starts as an interesting storyline about Mark's obsession with a creepy old house on a parallel street that backs onto his house. This part is possibly the best section of the book.
However, we soon jump back to after his disappearance again, and the rest of the book flips randomly. The timelines seem all messed up too. There's supposed to be 8 days between his mother's death and mark's disappearance, yet he and his friend seem to spend about two weeks and more before mark stumbles upon at least one of the house's dark secrets.
One of the creepiest things about the book for me was the number of times Tim, the narrator of the book, refers to his 15-year-old nephew's good looks. Every single time he refers to Mark, the word beautiful, or a close synonym, will appear. I got the message that Tim thought his nephew was beautiful first time he said it, I didn't need the other 3987 references to it.
Another structural deficit is the way the book switches from third person to first person quite randomly. The segments from Tim's journal make sense, but in other places, suddenly a paragraph will be full of I's instead of he's. This is in sections of third person narrative where Tim is referred to as Tim or he. Then suddenly he remembers he's the narrator and says I. And it's jarring. it makes no narrative point or sense.
Tim's reaction to his nephew's fate seems at odds with his character. Mark's fate, if we take it at face value from the book, is all kinds of icky and not in a good way. Tim's brother is allowed throughout to be a horrible racist and is never pulled up on it by any of the supposed nice people around him.
The style of writing, whilst it does have its inconsistencies, is always easily readable and grammatical. One member of the book group said it was a page turner. that's probably the best I can find to say about it.
I went into this book with very high expectations and was hugely disappointed. Maybe if I hadn't read it immediately after Foulsham I might have been more forgiving of it.
This is one book that's getting donated to a charity shop rather than going back on my shelves. I'm willing to try another of his books that I have on my shelves, since this had faint glimmers of quality. But this particular book rates a measly 4 out of 10 for me.
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