Dark Side of the Moonstruck

This post is likely to prove a challenge.  It's always tough to talk about tales with twists.  After all, you're effectively saying that something's great without being able to tell anyone why!  Anyway, let's give it a go...

I recently finished the latest book by the superlative thriller writer, Erin Kelly, 'He Said / She Said'.

'He Said / She Said'
by Erin Kelly
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2017)

'He Said / She Said' is a story of trust, truth and perspectives.  During a festival celebrating the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall, Laura witnesses a brutal assault.  But was it rape?  The victim Beth is silent while her attacker Jamie says it was consensual.  As Laura sends her boyfriend Kit to fetch help, she can't begin to imagine the terrible events that have been set in motion and how all their lives are about to change forever.

As the title implies, this is a story about viewpoints in relationships.  What the title doesn't tell you is that you can't trust Erin Kelly!  She lets you view the constellations and get your bearings, before re-aligning the stars and fortunes of everyone involved.  Can't help but think of her as more conjurer than writer, deftly playing on your expectations and misdirecting you, ready for the big reveal, when pieces you didn't even know were missing slot into place.

It would be easy to assume that this novel is a courtroom drama, but that's only one part of it.  'He Said / She Said' is a taut, gripping and chilling tale of how far people will go to protect themselves and their reputations.  By degrees, each character becomes more than what they appear, until you find yourself wondering how far you too would go in those circumstances.

If you enjoy thrillers and crime novels, I thoroughly recommend this book.  For a while, 'He Said / She Said' was available far too cheaply (99p as an ebook via Amazon and £5 as a hardback in a number of shops, for goodness sake.), but don't let that, or anything else, deceive you.  Put simply, it is absolutely brilliant.

Now, what next...

Related Links

'The Poison Tree' by Erin Kelly
BBC Radio 2 Book Club

You Have Been Warned!

I had a lovely surprise recently.  I discovered that I owned a book of Neil Gaiman short stories that I hadn't read!  After that, it didn't take me long to get stuck into 'Trigger Warning'.

'Trigger Warning'
by Neil Gaiman
(Headline, 2015)

'Trigger Warning' is Neil Gaiman's 2015 compilation of short stories and 'disturbances', encompassing tricky tales, tributes and poetry, plus a welcome addition to the 'American Gods' canon called 'Black Dog'.  A fictional girlfriend is realised in 'The Thing About Cassandra', while Sherlock Holmes returns in 'The Case of Death and Honey'.  Revenge is cold in 'The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains...' and the seaside sinister in 'My Last Landlady'.  A quiet, middle-class existence is threatened in 'Adventure Story', while a fairy tale kingdom is at risk in 'The Sleeper and the Spindle'.  Recent losses are felt with 'The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury' and 'The Return of the Thin White Duke'.  Meanwhile, the blood is chilled by a hungry spirit in 'Click-Clack the Rattlebag' and a hidden threat in 'Feminine Endings'.

This book is classic Gaiman, taking the reader by the hand and leading them through a twilight world of horror, fantasy and myth.  Much like the great Ray Bradbury, Gaiman's work is driven by his characters and their passions, meaning that there's something here even for people who don't normally read these genres.  It also means that there's variation in 'Trigger Warning'; I laughed, I cried, I found it hard to sleep at night...

Even so, the title of this book bothered me.  Somehow, 'trigger warning', the notice that is commonly used to alert readers / viewers to something that they may find upsetting, didn't really fit.  Perhaps in a world where the news seems like a 24 hour sci-fi / horror channel, the spooky has stopped seeming quite so threatening.  Or maybe it's because, unlike the truly horrifying, these are only fictional stories.

I loved this book, as I've loved many of Gaiman's other short story collections, not just for the fiction, but also for the delightful introductions in which the author gives each piece context and hints at the joy he seems to feel as a professional maker-upper-and-writing-downer.  I love the image of him dashing to his nearest and dearest each time he's finished something to share what he's created.

I would encourage the curious to at least give Neil Gaiman a go.  There have been some fantastic adaptations of his work recently on radio and TV, including a haunting reading of 'The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains...' by Bill Paterson, which I thoroughly recommend.

Now, I think I've gushed enough.  Perhaps I should've put a trigger warning on this post in case you might find the enthusiasm nauseating!

Now, what next...

Related Sites

Review of 'Fragile Things' by Neil Gaiman.

BBC production of 'The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains...' performed by Bill Paterson.

Neil Gaiman reading 'The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury'

Normal for Scarfolk

In retrospect, the 1970s and early '80s look a bit weird.  A time of fantastic pop music, scratchy man-made fibres and cold war - talk about the good, the bad and the ugly.  Those who lived through it may have noticed a sense of the sinister and supernatural that permeated popular culture.  But while the rest of us moved on - perhaps with a sigh of relief - the people of the enigmatic northern town of Scarfolk appear to have chosen a very different path...

'Discovering Scarfolk' by Richard Littler is a work of fiction (we hope), based on 'evidence' compiled by Dr Ben Motte as he pieced together the story of his missing university friend, Daniel Bush.  Bush and his two sons, Joe and Oliver, were travelling north to start a new life when a stop in Scarfolk changed everything.  Joe and Oliver vanished, leaving behind nothing but a mysterious cloud of stationery.  A panicked Daniel seeks help from the locals, who are at first unresponsive, then evasive and finally downright weird...

Very dark but also laugh out loud funny, 'Discovering Scarfolk' is a quintessentially British satire of a time long gone and a place that might still exist in some remote corner of our island.  Graphic artist Littler includes some eye catching parodies of public information posters and other ephemera that are so realistic I had to remind myself that they weren't real.  Not even the book about practical witchcraft.  The skilled blurring of fact and fiction just adds to the simultaneous unease and feeling of familiarity that pervades the book.  'Discovering Scarfolk' is an uncanny valley for the UK in the 1970s.

The only weakness here is the plot, but it hardly matters.  It's the idea of the time and place which is the star and the villain of the piece, and how Littler uses all the media at his disposal to teach us a thing or two about growing up before social media posts and digital photography allowed us to record every moment, making remembering anything almost unnecessary.  On every level, this is a book about memory and the tricks it can play.

'Discovering Scarfolk' is a book for people with a 'League of Gentlemen' sense of humour (unsurprisingly, Mark Gatiss is a fan), especially those who grew up in the '70s.  I'm sure there are many references this generation will get that I missed.

In Scarfolk, the past is a foreign county.  They do things very differently there.

For more information, please reread this post.

Related Links

The Scarfolk Blog