Review – Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley

So the first thing to say is that no one does bleakness like Andrew Michael Hurley. And there’s something attractive – and underrated – about bleakness. He did it so well in The Loney (review here) that you could almost feel yourself sinking into the sludge and fog of the Lancastrian coastline. And this time, in Devil’s Day, he creates the impression of a farming community so lost, isolated and ill at ease with itself that you really start to believe the devil might be haunting the moors and forests of the Ribble Valley – and exacting his price from the humans he preys on.

Born into the Endlands – said claustrophobic little farming community – John Pentecost has left to become a teacher in staid, sober Suffolk. He heads north, however, with his wife Kat and an agenda. John wants to return to the Endlands, and he wants Kat there with him. But the valley can’t hold back its secrets for long, and what at first appear to be quaint traditions and beliefs may reflect a darker truth – a truth which Kat refuses to accept.

Hurley excels at drip feed horror – at a gradual revelation of phenomena and events which may or may not be connected, and which may or may not have supernatural origins. And that is where the real complexity of his stories lie – in their ambiguity. Just as in The Loney, it’s hard to say with Devil’s Day where human work ends and the devil’s might begin. And evil itself might as easily be found in nature as it is in any external force for ill will.

It’s possible that Hurley might have overstretched the pacing somewhat with this one. The Loney paid out its surprises more evenly – with Devil’s Day, a good 50% of the novel is devoted to detailing The Endlands, its history and inhabitants. But then again, this contributes to a sense of a world that is lived in, that is real, and that could very well have settled into practices that set it beyond boundaries and belief systems.

Devil’s Day is a story that chills to the core. Perfect Halloween reading.

Review – The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

This is probably the angriest book I’ve read all year. The Mars Room is not just an indictment of the American prison system, but an exploration of how society itself fails many of those who get caught up in that system.

Romy Hall, a dancer at the infamous stripper joint ‘The Mars Room’ ends up in a high security Californian ‘Correctional Institution,’ having murdered the man who stalked her. At the same time she discovers that her mother – sole guardian of Romy’s little boy Jackson – has died, and that her own parental rights have been revoked. With no say in the matter, Romy is left estranged from her own child; unable to trace him from prison.

Part furious satire, part invective, Kushner’s novel exposes the farce of a system which leaves the most vulnerable in a position where they will almost inevitably end up behind bars. It is a system characterised by institutional violence. People like Romy – or her cell mate Button Sanchez – are victims of the conditions it creates; punished hypocritically by a society which refuses to examine the way it fails so many of its own citizens.

“The word violence,” narrates Romy, “was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.” (Kindle Loc 3292)

The Mars Room prises apart the myth of a judicial system aimed at rehabilitating prisoners. Such people are thrown into a cycle of violence and counter-violence from birth; the scapegoats of a society which refuses to examine itself and its own crimes.

A hard read, but an essential one.

 

Review: Snap by Belinda Bauer

I don’t read thrillers very often, but I’ve recently been on something of a crimefic roll after reading Alias by Cari Hunter  https://katecudahy.wordpress.com/2018/09/20/review-alias-by-cari-hunter/

Snap, by Belinda Bauer, was on the Booker longlist – a major achievement for a work of genre fiction – and comes with enthusiastic endorsement from Val McDermid, who has described it as “the best crime novel I’ve read in a long time.”

What attracted me to the book, however, was its intriguing subject matter. Based on the unsolved murder of Marie Wilks, Snap focuses very much on the trauma suffered by a victim’s family in the wake of their a loss. Jack Bright’s mother is brutally killed when he is just eleven years old. She leaves her car at the side of the motorway to make an emergency call and never comes back, leaving Jack to fend for himself and his two young sisters, Joy and Merry.

Cut to three years later and the kids have slipped off social services’ radar. Supported by Jack’s talent for breaking and entry, they are living in hand to mouth squalour. When an opportunity to track his mother’s killer presents itself, Jack seizes it, endangering both himself and his siblings.

For me, the thing which really shone through the whole book was Bauer’s portrayal of Jack – quickwitted and resourceful, yet the psychological damage he has endured and his age make him incredibly vulnerable. The plot never stalls, and there are sufficient twists to turn this into both a real page turner and a story which pivots sympathetically around a young boy’s deep sense of loss.

What I wasn’t so convinced of, however, were Bauer’s portrayals of the ‘supporting cast’, who  emerge at times as mere thumbnail portraits, veering towards stereotype and caricature without true depth. This was particularly the case with the crew of police officers introduced later in the story, ranging from the hard bitten, unorthodox veteran detective, to his fey, vein assistant, both of whom came across more as cliche than rounded character.

A really entertaining read but not Booker material.