An inventive, multi-layered horror novel structured around a cryptic document.
In Blackhurst’s debut horror novel, a lawyer attempts to understand a mass death event and avoid becoming one of its victims.
In 2017, two hunters in Kentucky came across a dead town; ‘dead’ in the sense that all of the residents—hundreds of them— seem to have been killed in a freak landslide. The event came to be known as the Carrington Tragedy, even though no one is sure that the town had been called Carrington (in fact, before the hunters stumbled across it, the outside world was entirely unaware of the town’s existence). The sole record of the town, and of what happened to it, is a series of 33 canvases, found buried in the rubble, on which a man called Richard Maltessouri had scribbled a difficult-to-decipher diary. The first entry begins, ominously, “I wish the marionettes would stop trying to break through the windows. Incredible. I’m not entirely convinced I’m still alive.” Though it’s unclear whether Richard was sane—or even real—his account implies Carrington suffered something closer to a massacre than a natural disaster, even if the claims in the barely legible diary (written in a hard-to-read paint called “tint”) are difficult to parse. Along with a colleague, lawyer Joseph Blackhurst travels to the Carrington site in an attempt to decrypt the demented diary, hoping that his efforts at transcription do not end, as previous attempts have, in catastrophe. The book is a metafictional puzzle, with two texts unraveling side-by-side: that of Richard Maltessouri and that of the fictional Blackhurst. The real-life Blackhurst writes them both with the kind of neurotic restraint that hints at larger, unspoken forces. “I should come clean,” confesses the character Blackhurst early on. “In a footnote, I wrote that no part of the Canvases would be edited or omitted during transcription to preserve a complete record of the evidence. However, certain inconsequential edits will be made at the decision of the Committee.” It’s a fun puzzle of a book, reminiscent at times of Mark Z. Danielewski’s work, creeping slowly from confusion to delightful terror.
An inventive, multi-layered horror novel structured around a cryptic document.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9798988484318
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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