Breakfast At Libraries: October 2015

Tuesday, 27 October 2015

Career Of Evil by Robert Galbraith

Like the first two books in the Cormoran Strike series, Career Of Evil features a central crime plot, into which is woven the story of the increasingly complicated personal lives of Strike and his assistant – or possibly junior partner – Robin Ellacott. During the previous novel, Robin’s wedding was postponed due to the death of her fiancé’s mother, but we begin Career Of Evil with Robin and Matthew on track for a June ceremony despite the ongoing bone of contention that is Robin’s work with Strike. At the start of Career Of Evil, she’s expecting a package of wedding favours to be delivered to the office and opens without a thought the large, oblong parcel a courier has just dropped off for her – only to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg.

The crime plot in this instalment in the series is a deeply personal one: the killer, from whose point of view several chapters unfold, is obsessively stalking Robin and appears to have a longstanding grudge against Strike, who famously lost a leg during his military career – plus, the leg comes with a note quoting lyrics by Blue Öyster Cult, the favourite band of Strike’s dead, super-groupie mother. But of course, this is Strike we’re talking about. When asked to think who might hate him enough to send parts of a corpse to his office, he immediately thinks of not just one suspect, but four. Which of them could be the culprit? Who did the leg belong to? And how will the killer up his game?

Career Of Evil is certainly the darkest in the Cormoran Strike series so far. The body count is high and all three suspects are sadistic misogynists – as you’d expect, the chapters from the anonymous killer are particularly grisly and disturbing. As a horror reader, I have no issue with gore, but the killer’s-eye sections did become a little repetitive in their gruesomeness. Also a little repetitive are some of the procedural elements of the action: the investigation is surveillance-heavy, so there’s an awful lot of Strike and Robin following people who are actually not doing a great deal. Other than that, however, the plot is a satisfying one with a clever and wholly unexpected twist, and the characters are, as always in Robert Galbraith’s/JK Rowling’s writing, exceptionally vivid and astutely observed.

The Robert Galbraith books are as much about Strike and Robin, and their complex friendship, as they are about crime, and it's fair to say that the road for them is a bumpy one in this instalment. Interestingly, Robin's fiancé Matthew, who was dull but largely well-meaning in The Cuckoo's Calling and then somewhat petulant in The Silkworm, is increasingly needy and controlling in Career Of Evil.

Like all JK Rowling's writing, whatever the pen name, Career Of Evil is crammed with detail, which some readers may find tiresome, but which appeals a great deal to me in a crime novel, where every observation could be clue and specifics count. Despite the heavily descriptive style, at no point did I feel the book was proceeding too slowly, and the last few chapters are a nailbiting race against time, which despite the satisfying resolution of the whodunnit plot, will almost certainly leave you feeling impatient for book four.

Monday, 26 October 2015

Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough

If you remember the nursery rhymes and songs of your childhood, you'll probably recall that some of them are frankly quite sinister. Not your Baa Baa Black Sheeps or your Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars, so much, but consider Three Blind Mice, in which blind mice have their tails cut off by a farmer's wife. Or Ding Dong Bell, in which someone attempts to drown a cat in a well. My personal favourite is Oranges And Lemons, which after a vaguely threatening dialogue about debt played out by London church bells, culminates with 'here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes the chopper to chop off your head.'

These, however, have nothing on Long Lankin, a genuinely terrifying folk ballad beseeching us to 'Beware of Long Lankin who lives in the moss', lest he 'creep in' to the house and conspire with a baby's 'false nurse' to kill it by pricking it all over with a pin. I read this poem in a library book of traditional rhymes when I was a child and never forgot the horridness of it. For this reason, I was immediately drawn to Lindsey Barraclough's novel of the same name, the story of two girls in the 1950s who are sent from the East End to live with an estranged aunt in the country and discover that their family is haunted by a terrible curse.

I wasn't disappointed. I gather Long Lankin is being marketed as a young adult novel but it absolutely stands up as an adult read. It somehow manages to be at times sweet and endearing - Cora and Roger, the children from whose points of view the story unfolds, are funny, honest and deeply loveable; I never tired of their company - and yet at times incredibly dark and utterly terrifying. There's a strong sense of eeriness that builds to full-on horror and a climax full of pace and tension.

The sense of place is perfectly evoked, with all the fun of a childhood spent playing in country lanes and going to village cricket matches contrasted perfectly with the more unsettling elements of the rural England - dark woods, tidal marshlands, abandoned churches and mysterious folklore.

The alternating viewpoints of Cora and Roger give us contrasting perspectives not just on the setting but of life in general. Cora is born and bred among the bombsites of post-war Limehouse to a feckless father and an unstable mother, and feels deeply protective of her little sister Mimi - I constantly wanted to hug her and relieve her of the terrible burden of responsibility that seems far too heavy for her young shoulders. Cheerful country boy Roger, on the other hand, has known nothing but security and stability: his younger siblings may wreak havoc but his parents are kind and his main worries are the need to do occasionally dished-out household chores as his mother's attention is focused on his more demanding brothers and baby sister.

Every character in Long Lankin feels vivid and real, and even the supernatural elements of the story are all too credible. Although the pace builds very rapidly at the end, this isn't a novel that moves particularly fast, but this didn't matter to me; I enjoyed the slow build of the horror and also the growing friendship between Cora and Roger, built over many long summer days of wandering the countryside and, of course, going to all the very places they've been told to avoid. When the true horror of the Long Lankin legend really begins to unfold in earnest, it's all the more frightening.

If I had to find fault with this book, it's that the switches in narration happen very rapidly at times - sometimes we only get a few paragraphs from one view point before we switch to another and back again - which sometimes felt jarring and a little disjointed. Apart from that, I'd really find it hard to pick holes in this one: it's an absolutely cracking read full of creepy atmosphere and out-and-out horror, yet also has an appealing warmth at its heart.

Wednesday, 14 October 2015

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly by Stephanie Oakes

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly is a young adult novel by American writer Stephanie Oakes. The eponymous protagonist is seventeen and has recently experienced her first love affair, but this is a dark novel with some extremely harrowing scenes, so don't assume the target audience makes it a lighter read.

Image result for the sacred lies of minnow bly

At the start of the book, Minnow is arrested in mysterious circumstances for a shockingly brutal crime. One of the first things we learn about her is that she has recently lost both her hands, and shortly afterwards we discover that she has spent the last 12 years living in a polygamous cult in a strange, enclosed community hidden in the Montana wilderness. The Kevinians live their lives away from the 'Gentiles' in accordance with a set of oppressive rules laid down by their increasingly tyrannical leader. Women are subordinate; non-white people are considered evil; there is no medical care, no electricity, no running water - and most importantly, no escape. But when Minnow stumbles across Jude, a mixed-race boy living with his father in a forest cabin, she begins to question life in the Community more than ever before.

Much of the story is told in flashback, interspersed with present-day sections detailing Minnow's life in 'juvie', essentially an American young offenders' institute (which, frankly, is quite an eye-opener in terms of the way children are treated by the American justice system). Investigating the horrors of the Community and trying to get to the bottom of its Prophet's death is an FBI officer who regularly interviews Minnow and to whom she tells her story in uneasy, selective stages.

The relationship between Minnow and this officer felt somewhat uncomfortable for me as a reader, not least because he is described as a counsellor but behaves like nothing of the sort. He is clearly a detective first and foremost and his questioning of Minnow is often manipulative and even edging towards cruel. However, there are also times when he seems more sympathetic as a character, and the uneasy deal that Minnow strikes with him is, ultimately, one that works in her favour. This is a novel in which adults and teenagers are, in general, wary of one another, with the children in the novel repeatedly failed by the adults around them.

There were several elements of The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly that stretched credibility for me, and its weakest point was in fact the resolution of the mystery of the Prophet's murder, which felt anticlimactic. Minnow's adaptation to life a) with no hands and b) away from the Kevinians seemed to be surprisingly simple, too.

I note that Amazon.co.uk classifies this as Young Adult => Literature & Fiction => Religious. I have no idea if the author intends the book to have a religious message: one of the threads of the story involves Minnow rejecting the beliefs of the Kevinian cult and she is, overall, relatively positive about her experience at a meeting of the prison Christian group, in contrast to her resentful cellmate, who has rejected religion after being abused by her devout uncle and prides herself on her knowledge of science. However, if there is intended to be a Christian message here about the dangers of false prophets, it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, not least because the language and manner in which the Kevinians' bizarre beliefs are expressed makes them feel almost like a biblical parody.

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly is an intense, well-written novel which, if you share my fascination with isolated cults and fundamentalist communities, couldn't fail to engage you. Some of the darker elements are perhaps a little melodramatic, but overall it's a gripping read with a note of hope at the end.

Monday, 12 October 2015

Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell

I was fairly convinced I was going to love Paul Cornell's Witches of Lychford. It's a novella about a small town at risk of falling prey to supernatural forces under the guise of the building of a new supermarket. Three women - an irascible witch, a vicar and the owner of a local new age shop coming to terms with her discovery that Lychford is built on a portal to the world of the fairies - join forces with some reluctance to foil the supermarket scheme and hence foil the evil plan to take control of Lychford. It features a small English town, interesting female characters and has elements of English folklore; these are all things I enjoy in fiction.

Unfortunately, I just felt Witches of Lychford was somewhat lacking. There was plenty about it I enjoyed, particularly some of the humour; a couple of lines are laugh-out-loud funny and there's a satirical tone throughout. The three women at the heart of the story are solidly rendered and convincing, and the set-up is a promising one. However, its short length - it comes in at under 150 pages - means there is little time for the plot to develop in any depth, and there isn't enough going on to give it sufficient pace to make up for this. The resolution of the story is somewhat anticlimactic too.

There was something about Witches of Lychford that made me feel as if I was reading a synopsis for a 90-minute TV drama rather than reading a novel. It's fun, but the story is all over almost before it really begins and I didn't find myself particularly desperate to keep turning the pages. I also felt I'd have liked it to be creepier, more unsettling - the cover, I think, is somewhat misleading as I didn't find it particularly eerie at any point.

I'd definitely look out for more books by Paul Cornell as the ideas and characters in Witches of Lychford held much appeal for me and there were some very sharp, well-observed lines. I would, however, want to look for a longer and more involved novel next time.

Saturday, 3 October 2015

The House of Susan Lulham by Phil Rickman

The House of Susan Lulham is part of Phil Rickman's popular Merrily Watkins series*, but is not a full-length instalment - it's a novella (around 100ish pages), currently available as a rather beautiful little hardback edition as well as an appropriate-priced Kindle Single and a three-hour audiobook download. Parish priest Merrily is contacted by a woman convinced that her modern, architect-designed home is haunted by the ghost of its previous occupant, a minor celebrity who took her own life in a particularly gruesome manner. As a trained 'deliverance' minister - that's a Church of England exorcist to you and me - Merrily blesses the property, but as usual with Merrily's cases, things don't end there.

The length of the story means there are no subplots and the large cast of recurring characters regular Merrily readers would recognise is mostly absent - there are brief appearances from Jane, Francis Bliss and Sophie (who happens to be one of my favourite characters in the series) but this is very much Merrily's story. That's not a criticism - my principal disappointment in the last full-length book in the series was that there was not enough of Merrily in it, and a novella is very different animal from a 400-page novel, with less room for a complex plot.

Perhaps also for this reason, there is less in the way of mystery here than in the full-length books. Many bookshops classify the Merrily Watkins series as crime rather than horror or paranormal, but The House of Susan Lulham feels much more like a straightforward ghost story than anything else. Many of Rickman's books feature old properties and ancient rural folklore, but in this story there's a pleasing contrast between age-old fears and rituals and the modernity of the haunted property.

If you're a big Merrily fan, I'd recommend this an interesting, although non-essential, add-on to the series. If you're not, this book probably works well as a standalone introduction - whereas the other novels are best read in order of publication, The House of Susan Lulham doesn't really require any additional context to be enjoyed. It's strong on atmosphere and the characters - even the ones we only encounter through conversations with others - are credible and three-dimensional.

*At the time of this blog post, a TV adaptation of the second book in the series, The Midwinter of the Spirit, is being broadcast on ITV, starring Anna Maxwell Martin as Merrily. It's a well-made and creepy drama, but not especially faithful to the book, with various changes made to the circumstances and relationships of the characters.