Breakfast At Libraries

Dolly is one of Susan Hill's supernatural novellas. My copy is a nice little hardcover edition; I have matching editions of The Small Hand and Printer's Devil Court, also by Hill, and they're very nicely designed.

Dolly is the story of two cousins who are invited to spend the summer with their aunt in her isolated ancestral home. Edward and Leonora are the children of Dora and Violet, Aunt Kestrel's much younger, feuding sisters. Dora is now dead, leaving Edward an orphan, and international socialite Violet has been drifting from country to country for years, living in hotels with Leonora in tow, her lifestyle financed mainly by a succession of boyfriends. Part of the story takes place in the present, with Edward and Leonora returning to Iyot House after Aunt Kestrel's death, and the rest is set during their childhood stay there.

Susan Hill excels at building atmosphere and making places feel like characters in their own right. Iyot House, large and rambling with its isolated Fenland location, is every bit as damp and bleak as The Woman In Black's Eel Marsh House. The rain falls even throughout the summer and there's a general sense of decay about the place, with a flat, grey gloominess to the landscape.

Edward, from whose point of the view the story is told, is a polite, timid child and a polite, non-confrontational adult, constantly nervous but also stoical and innately kind. By contrast, Leonora is rude, spiteful, thoughtless and self-centred. Despite this, there are times when you will feel sorry for Leonora, spoilt but unloved by the mother she clearly idolises and resigned to a life of a succession of 'stepfathers'. Are Leonora's tantrums solely down to her upbringing, or is there someone or something at Iyot House that's driving her to worse and worse behaviour? Housekeeper Mrs Mullen seems to think so - does she have a point, or does she simply hate children?

I have some very minor issues with the sequence of events, as I think there is a slight flaw in the logic at one point early on in the story, but  Dolly is certainly a very creepy book indeed, and by and large it's beautifully constructed. Although its cover calls it a ghost story, it isn't really a ghost story in a literal sense. It's is a supernatural horror story, but the 'haunting' isn't the traditional sort and to me, Dolly reads like a cross between MR James and one of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected.

It's short enough to read in one sitting (and I would recommend doing so), yet long enough to build the characters effectively and to lend it some extra nuance that might have been absent in a short story. It also leaves plenty of scope for the reader to decide why certain things might have been happened and who or what might be responsible; it doesn't spoonfeed the reader with clear explanations. This would make a great read for a rainy summer afternoon or a winter evening by the fire - and if the BBC don't adapt it as a ghost story for the Christmas schedules one day, they're really missing a trick.

Jonathan Coe has been one of my favourite writers ever since I was blown away by What A Carve Up! and The House Of Sleep when I was a student, around 20 years ago. Number 11 is a sequel of sorts to What A Carve Up!, although only in a loose sense. Consider the notes made by one  character about What A Whopper, a film said to be a sequel of What A Carve Up!, itself a comedy that gives Coe's previous novel its name:

“What a Whopper … Sequel to What a Carve Up!? Not really. Two of the same actors.

"Sequels which are not really sequels. Sequels where the relationship to the original is oblique, slippery.”

While there are appearances in Number 11 from a couple of What A Carve Up!'s hideous Winshaw family, whose greed, wealth and entitlement causes endless harm not just to individuals but to society itself, it's really the themes and subject matter that link the two books. Number 11 examines the current state of the nation - a nation seemingly poisoned by lies and deception from the rich and powerful - and explores the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us, loss of trust in politics and politicians, and the personal impacts of political policies and ideologies on its characters.

Rachel, a tutor to the children of an obscenely rich, tax-avoiding family, is haunted by the death of David Kelly, the first major news story she remembers reading about as a child and which symbolises Britain's transformation into a disturbed nation forever tainted by mistrust. Police officer Nathan Pilbeam solves murder cases by looking at the political context in which they occur. A newspaper columnist delights in tracking down - and destroying - a real-life example of the right-wing tabloids' favourite bogeyman, the 'black disabled lesbian on benefits', while a reality TV show leaves an impoverished contestant traumatised and exploited. The number 11 of the title refers to many things - including 11 Downing Street, a Birmingham circular bus route on which people stay for hours to avoid going home to a house they can't afford to heat, and the bottom floor of a dangerously deep basement extension being dug into the bowels of London under Rachel's employers' home. Moreover, Number 11 is also Coe's eleventh novel; he is rarely averse to self-referential moments in his fiction.
There are so many interlinked plot strands and ideas in Number 11 that I can't even come close to outlining them all. Like most of Coe's books, it's full of neat, satisfying connections between people and events. As always, I'm struck by how cleverly Coe constructs this intricate web, yet at the same time makes it feel effortlessly organic. The fortunes of Coe's characters can turn on the misunderstanding of a single word, a small coincidence or a seemingly unimportant detail. A casual reference to a child's sore knee sees her return as an adult with an amputated leg; a waitress's small talk results in her partner going to prison.

Coe is also adept at pinpointing the sorts of moments in childhood that shape future interests and even foreshadow fates. (In What A Carve Up!, Michael's story is shaped by the unsettlingly dark comedy he watches at the cinema on a British seaside holiday and can never forget.) My favourite example in Number 11, and possibly my favourite element of the whole book, is Roger, a film critic, who becomes obsessed with tracking down a German film he saw on television as a child in the days when channels were few and short films were often dropped into TV schedules to fill unplanned gaps. Coe understands perfectly how something seemingly obscure and fleeting can leave such a strong imprint on the memory and be so powerfully evocative. Roger's fixation with The Crystal Garden resonated incredibly strongly with me (there's every chance I will one day die in a freak accident brought about by my search for an eerie children's programme called The Bells of Astercote which has haunted me for 35 years. The BFI won't answer my emails) and I don't think I've ever seen the intensity of that kind of experience accurately portrayed before.

Film in general is a clear influence on Number 11, and there are various references to films and film study throughout. Characters make comparisons to Psycho, for example, and (perhaps most tellingly) the 70s horror film Death Line also gets a mention. There is even a touch of Quatermass & The Pit about the 11-storey hole being dug beneath the home of Rachel's employer. There is a sinister thread running through the book, with a significance attributed to a playing card illustrated with a grotesque spider, and the ending does have a feeling of a certain type of British horror B-movie. The weird and unnerving often simmers below the surface of ordinary life in Jonathan Coe's work, and occasionally boils over to gain supremacy, giving some moments a somewhat dreamlike atmosphere, as if we as readers are teetering on the edge of reality and satire is giving way to something altogether stranger and darker.

At around this moment in a review I would usually mention the things I didn't like about the book, but in this case that's impossible, because I loved Number 11 as much as I've loved all Coe''s novels - I'm already looking forward to the day when I come to re-read it.

While I was on holiday in Orkney I stayed in one of those old-school, cosy hotels that puts the books guests leave behind on a shelf in the corridor for other people to read. Despite always travelling with my Kindle and buying several books from independent bookshops in Kirkwall and Stromness while I was away, I still can't resist browsing these shelves and this time I picked up a copy of Mitch Benn's Terra to read during my stay.

Friends of the Dusk is the thirteenth book in Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins series, of which I've been a fan for many years. Although I enjoyed The House of Susan Lulham, a short 'extra' novella which preceded Friends of the Dusk, the last full-length Merrily Watkins book, The Magus of Hay, was probably my least favourite in the series - but I'm pleased to say I found Friends of the Dusk to be a real return to form.

The story begins with the discovery of an ancient skeleton buried on unconsecrated ground, the skull of which is stolen. However, it's not this 'deviant burial' that Anglican vicar and deliverance minister (or exorcist) Merrily is looking into, but the apparent haunting of a old, isolated property occupied by a builder who specialises in the renovation of listed buildings and his Muslim daughter and son-in-law. Meanwhile, DI Francis Bliss is investigating the brutal murder of a young archaeologist. Needless to say, Merrily and Bliss soon cross paths - but are their cases really linked, and if so, how?

Friends of the Dusk sees Merrily return to centre-stage after her disappointingly low-key role in The Magus of Hay. She's not only central to the supernatural elements of the plot, but is also grappling with the threat posed by the obnoxious new bishop to her deliverance role. There's much more of Merrily's daughter Jane in this book too, and it was interesting to see her undergoing something of a crisis of her own (although it's not one that seems to be fully resolved, so I'll be interested to see if it continues in the next book). The relationship between Merrily and Jane has matured convincingly and touchingly over the course of the series, and this is particularly pleasing in this instalment, with far more trust between them and Jane acting as Merrily's unpaid researcher. I was also pleased to see Lol Robinson back from his tour and a stint in the recording studio and playing an active role in the mystery plot as well as in Merrily's personal life.

Phil Rickman is particularly good at building characters from bit-parters into main players, of whom there is now a large and varied cast. In Friends of the Dusk, Merrily's mentor Huw Owen and the Bishop of Hereford's secretary Sophie Hill are on truly excellent form - in fact, this may well be Sophie's finest hour yet, and she's always been one of my favourite characters - and the mysterious Anthea/Athena White makes a fascinating return.

Like all the novels in the series, this is an atmospheric and gripping read full of Rickman's trademark cliffhanger chapter endings and local folklore references. The supernatural elements are well-executed as always and hang together well with the police-procedural crime plot led by Bliss. There's nothing particularly new here that you won't already recognise from previous books in the series, but frankly, if you were looking for a change you'd have moved on to a different series by now, as the pleasure of the Merrily Watkins comes from the familiarity of the general set-up and the ongoing development of the recurring characters. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book on holiday and look forward to book 14.

Hello from Orkney, where I'm currently on holiday and blogging from a lovely self-catering apartment in Kirkwall. As I've got plenty of time to relax and have been spending a lot of hours travelling I've been able to catch up on some reading after a few weeks of not having much time or energy to get stuck into a book.

After finishing Hex I moved straight on to The Fire Child by SK Tremayne. Lots of you will probably have seen the same author's previous novel The Ice Twins in bookshops, WHSmith's and even supermarkets, as it appeared to sell very well. I reviewed that one here.

As you can probably tell from the title, The Fire Child is not much of a departure in style from The Ice Twins. Like its predecessor it has at its heart a young woman battling with her own psychological demons and faced with caring for an enigmatic, possibly disturbed child in an isolated setting and with a husband she isn't entirely sure she can trust. This time, the setting is a Cornish mansion belonging to the ancient Kerthen family. The current master of Carnhallow is David Kerthen, a super-rich corporate lawyer, whom the protagonist Rachel has married after a whirlwind romance. She's also become stepmother to Jamie, David's eight-year-son. David's wife Nina, Jamie's mother, was killed only eighteen months previously in a terrible accident in one of the many disused mine shafts that surround Carnhallow and which were once the source of the Kerthen fortune.

Rachel is a working class girl from a south London council estate who has somewhat reinvented herself and has been struggling to get by lecturing in photography prior to meeting David. Besotted by her handsome older husband and overwhelmed by the beauty of Carnhallow, she frequently feels lonely and out of her depth, particularly as Jamie is withdrawn in her presence, David is in London for most of the week and the house is packed with constant reminders of chic, capable, captivating Nina. When Jamie begins to claim his mother is still somewhere in the house, and starts to show signs of the second sight the Kerthen men are reputed to possess, Rachel begins to wonder if he's seriously disturbed - or is it, in fact, Rachel whose sanity is in question?

One of the great strengths of The Fire Child is its powerfully atmospheric description of the Cornish landscape - beautiful, yet harsh and intimidating in its rugged wildness - which is brilliantly done throughout. SK Tremayne also does well in evoking the peculiar oppressiveness of history. The weight of hundreds of generations of tradition, pride and, in fact, cruelty sits heavily on David Kerthen's shoulders and is as much an intrusion into Rachel's marriage as the dead Nina. If you're thinking the story has echoes of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, you'd be right; there are several similarities between Rachel's situation at Carnhallow and the second Mrs De Winter's plight at Manderley and I think it works well as homage rather than imitation.

The characterisation was, for me, something of a problem in this book. David is indeed rich and handsome, but his supposed appeal was lost on me. Someone who demands his martinis 'faintly poisoned with vermouth' and claims not to know how many bedrooms his house has is not a charming sophisticate: he is smarmy and pretentious, and Rachel, who is an intelligent woman of 30 and not a naive young girl, should be more than capable of realising this. I also struggled with Rachel as a character. There are inconsistencies that can be explained away by the eventual outcome of her storyline, but there are also some quite fundamental things that don't see to ring true to me and some minor things that are directly contradictory - a redhead, she claims her freckled Celtic skin 'never takes a tan' and then refers a few pages later to her 'tanning shoulders'; she says the only alcohol she likes is port having previously referred fondly to her champagne-fuelled dates with David. Her desire to form a bond with Jamie is essential to the plot and to later revelations, yet just doesn't ring particularly true for most of the book and isn't borne out by her behaviour towards him on a practical level. That said, as the book progresses SK Tremayne does a good job of conveying Rachel's mental state.

This is a novel full of dark secrets and shock twists. Despite my issues with the characters, it is absolutely a page-turner and the pace is perfect. It's tense and chilling and has a touch of the modern gothic about it.

I do, however, think the final big revelation is just too much of a stretch of plausibility for me - I obviously don't expect gritty realism from this kind of book, but I do need to be able to read without rolling my eyes, and this was a moment where the tension was broken for me as I simply stopped being able to suspend disbelief. There also are too many elements that can't adequately be explained away by what unfolds at the end. Also irksome is an incidence of violence against a woman which, while taken appropriately seriously in the story at the time it occurs, is later handled by the author in a way I found rather dismissive.

I did enjoy reading this book, despite its flaws, and finished it very quickly, which is usually a good sign. Although I didn't think it was quite as good as The Ice Twins (which has the edge for me simply because of its superior and more original premise) it was a good holiday read overall.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Fire Child via NetGalley on the understanding that I would provide an honest review.

Hex is a translation from the Dutch of a novel by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. However (as the author's end note points out) it is slightly more than that. The author, who is fluent in English, not only decided to shift the story's setting from a village in the Netherlands to a rural town in America's Hudson Valley in upstate New York, but also apparently completely re-wrote the ending. I have no idea how the original Dutch version ends, but I would, if I'm being entirely honest, have liked the translation to retain the Netherlands setting at least. There are already a million horror novels set in the US and I would have liked a more Dutch perspective. That said, the setting of the translation is rendered very well, and the history of that area means it does retain some of the 'Dutchness' of the original - there's a touch of Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow about it.