“Slade House” by David Mitchell (2015)

“Whatever Mum’s saying’s drowned out by the grimy roar of the bus pulling away, revealing a pub called The Fox and Hounds.”

Which idiot decided to read a book about a haunted house while living alone in a very quiet block of flats? Oh, looks like it was me. Fortunately, it’s David Mitchell, and he writes too well for me to stay mad at for long.

In 1979, precocious child Nathan Bishop and his mother Rita are invited to a musical soiree at Slade House, home of Lady Norah Grayer. While Nathan would rather be anywhere else, Rita is excited to be mixing with a quality set, finally able to show off her musical abilities. The house, however, proves harder to find than she imagines, and the only entrance seems to be a small, black, iron door in the brick wall of Slade Alley. Once inside, Nathan befriends Jonah, a child in the house, but things soon take a darker turn when Nathan finds a portrait on the wall of himself, dressed in exactly the same clothes he’s currently wearing.

Nine years later, in 1988, divorced police officer Gordon Edmonds finds his way into Slade House. In 1997, Sally Timms and her university friends stumble into it as part of a trip with the Paranormal Society. In 2006, Sally’s sister Freya makes the trip, and in 2015, it’s time for Dr Iris Marinus-Fenby to visit. Each person visiting seems to have little in common, except for one very important thing: none of them ever leave. Because Slade House is not like a normal house, and every nine years it must take another victim…

Another one of those books it’s difficult to talk about without giving too much away, it’s typical of Mitchell in that the genre is fluid (as genre should be) and it serves as several stories interlocking into one another, although not to the extreme way that he did with the masterpiece that is Cloud Atlas. The horror of the house is juxtaposed nicely by the fact that all the characters we see get taken in by its mystery and magic all feel almost disturbingly real, with full – if not necessarily happy – lives. Each story plays with blurring reality and fiction too, and unless you’ve got your wits about you, it can be hard to work out what’s really happening and what isn’t.

A chilling, sharp little book that is packed with surprises.

Looking for something else? Try my novels, The Atomic Blood-Stained Bus (the story of a cannibal and an ex-god) and The Third Wheel (a comedic alien invasion tale), test yourself with a quiz from my book Questioning Your Sanity, or visit my website and I’ll cultivate you a whole quiz on whatever subjects you like. If you just want more reviews, guide yourself around my blog with the navigation bar and find hundreds of reviews at your fingertips.

“The Chalk Man” by C. J. Tudor (2018)

“The girl’s head rested on a small pile of orange-and-brown leaves.”

Given the state of the world, fiction always serves as a grand, eternal escape, but one would imagine I’d be wanting to fall into something soft and funny that acts as a welcome distraction. As it is, I find myself inside the creepiest thriller I’ve read in a long time. Despite the subject matter, I can’t recommend it enough.

In 1986, Eddie was just twelve years old. He was pretty normal, spending time with his friends Fat Gav, Hoppo, Metal Mickey and Nicky in their average town. That was, until he saved Waltzer Girl’s life. This is perhaps the beginning of the story, although he can’t be entirely sure. It was certainly then that he met the albino teacher Mr Halloran. It would be later that he and his friends began drawing chalk men, and later still that the chalk men began appearing on their own. It was before the body was found, however. That was when it all came to an end.

In 2016, Ed, now a teacher himself and doing his best to hide from the past receives a letter in the post that threatens to bring everything back to the forefront of his mind. When Metal Mickey reappears in his life, too, things seem particularly nasty. Mickey wants to write a book about what happened back in 1986 and wants Ed’s help in filling in the gaps. Because it turns out that the police were wrong all those years ago. Mickey knows who really killed her, and now Ed sees that he’s got to dive back into the past and relive the worst years of his life in order to get the answers the world has been missing for thirty years…

It’s been a long time since I devoured a book so quickly. It is the very definition of gripping, and keeps you enticed until the very last page before it finally lets go of your lapels and throws you back into reality, confused and scared. The fact the narrative switches between the two time periods in roughly alternating chapters means we pick up the story in the wrong order, but references are often made to things that will happen in the future, or happened in the past that we’ve not seen yet. As such, the jigsaw begins to come together, but we must have lost the box with the picture on it, as it never seems to get any clearer. If anything, I found it much easier to work out what wasn’t going on than what was.

It’s the kind of story that, in the wrong hands, would be bland, boring and tiresomely predictable. As it is, Tudor manages to produce a masterful example of the genre, filled with exactly the right levels of unease, tension, bluff and pathos that is required. The characters are rich and interesting, and even when it feels like it’s leaning too heavily on coincidences and chance, she somehow gets away with it and there is an answer for everything. I’m wary to say too much about this book, as to speak too openly about it will remove much of the tension and might untangle some of the twists before you get to them. Most, you’ll never see coming.

I guess, really, the book is all about questions and answers, memory and secrets. It reminds us that in seeking out the truth, sometimes we find out things we’ve always wondered about, and other times we learn things that we simply wish we’d never uncovered. As Fat Gav says, conjuring up a vivid mental image, everyone has secrets and everyone has an arsehole, but some are just dirtier than others.

Beware the past – it is not the place it once was.

My second novel, The Third Wheel, is now available on Amazon and Waterstones! It tells the story of Dexter, a twenty-something teacher who is struggling with the fact that he alone among his friends is single and isn’t ready to grow up. But when aliens invade, it puts a lot of his problems into perspective. Mixing comedy, science fiction and horror, the novel promises to have something for everyone. I hope you’ll check it out!

“The Way Inn” by Will Wiles (2014)

“The bright red numbers on the radio-alarm clock beside my bed arranged themselves into the unfortunate shape of 6:12.”

Although I’m not much of a traveller, I am familiar with hotels. Actually, I quite like them. Mostly, though, I end up in budget hotels of the Travelodge or Premier Inn variety, and am always struck by the similarity that exists between the chains, regardless of where you actually are. The homogeneous nature of them is somewhat comforting, but also more than a little creepy. They can feel like non-places, buildings that you don’t really belong in, and can never feel quite at home.

The Way Inn introduces us to Neil Double, a professional conference-goer. His company serves a singular purpose – if you don’t want to waste working hours at a conference, but still want to know what gets said, Neil goes in your place, making notes, reporting back, and doing all the face-to-face business himself. This time, he finds himself at a conference for conference organisers, staying in another comfortably familiar branch of the Way Inn hotel chain.

However, after attending a few stalls and talks, he discovers that his cover is blown, and the conference organiser, Tom Laing, is not impressed by his new business model, which he claims will lose them ticket sales if one man can do the work of many companies. Banned from the conference, a dejected Neil returns to the hotel. Maybe he’ll get to sleep with that woman, if he could just remember her name, or maybe he’ll find that mysterious redhead he once encountered in a Way Inn in Qatar. He’s seen her once this weekend, and he thinks she works for the hotel. She seems far more interested in the hotel artwork than him, though.

After a restless night’s sleep, and with no conference to attend anymore, Neil begins to explore the hotel further and soon he finds himself stumbling into a mystery so huge and so strange that he could not even have begun to believe it. His life is about to be blown all out of proportion as the art-loving woman starts making him question his own reality. Who paints all those pictures in hotels? Where does one buy clock radios by the thousand? And just what would happen if you exited your hotel room and, instead of turning left towards the lifts, you turned right, deeper into the hotel?

This story actually takes on a conceit I’ve had for ages about these sorts of places and runs with it to places far better, funnier, scarier and greater than I could ever have done. Wiles is a master at focusing on the minutia of the thing, and chain hotels seem to be the perfect places to emphasis the tiny details. The mirrors in the lifts to make us feel less alone; the sofas in the corridors that aren’t meant for sitting in, but instead just to make it look furnished; the courtyards that look like meditation gardens but are only used by smokers; the strange unstealable coat hangers and unopenable windows. The hotel is as much of a character as any of the humans here, and it’s one that I think all of us can relate to.

Far funnier to me though is the idea of a conference for people who organise conferences; companies that specialise in selling lanyards, tote bags or conference centres. The idea that there is an industry overseeing the meetings of every other industry is hilarious, but also almost certainly the case. The idea of Neil being a professional conference surrogate is also an entertaining one, and if the idea doesn’t already exist, then I can see it coming to reality in five or ten years. While moving from hotel to hotel to listen to speeches about things you don’t really care about doesn’t appeal to me, I daresay there would be people willing to do it, and even more willing to pay for such a service.

I spent the first third of the book hoping that it would become what I hoped it would become, and thankfully it did, and the novel you’ve ended with is nothing really like the one you began. But Wiles changes tone and genre so wonderfully that you don’t even notice, and everything seems so real and oddly familiar. It welcomes you in like the little green light that flashes on a hotel lock when your keycard is recognised, and you’re more than happy to stay for the duration.

It’s a great read, and you’ll never want to check out at the end. In fact, you might not be able to…

“First Novel” by Nicholas Royle (2013)

First Novel. Royle’s seventh novel.

“I am sitting, alone, in my shared office at the university.”

There is something quite remarkable about a first novel. And I can actually speak from experience on this topic as I’ve just had my first book published. (There’s a link at the bottom of this review if you want to check it out.) It is, after all, the first time that an author speaks to the world and shares his or her thoughts, feelings and ideas with the world at large. This is just one of the topics up for discussion in Royle’s novel, First Novel.

This is the story of Paul Kinder, a creative writing tutor in Manchester who wrote one book many years ago that sold poorly and now spends his time teaching, trying to work on a second book, and picking up women to have sex with in his car. Although somewhat anti-social, he attends a friend’s barbeque and meets a man called Lewis, another writer with a firm hatred of pilots due to some darkness in his past.

Paul struggles with his students, his job and his own mind as the story goes on. It is interspered with excerpts from novels written by his students, some of them perhaps hitting a little closer to home than he would like to admit. He also struggles to make decisions, many pages dedicated to “either/or” scenarios, and he also acknowledges he sometimes finds it hard to tell the difference between opposites – on or off, light or dark … dead or alive.

At this point, trying to explain the rest of the story is fairly futile and would only spoil it. Not much happens, really, for a long time in the novel. It’s slow to get into, yet oddly gripping. Kinder has an obsession with writers’ first novels, as well as looking at pictures in magazines of their houses to see if he can find a copy of his own book on any of their shelves. Minuscule actions are described in intense detail, such as in the first few pages when he dismantles a Kindle down to its component parts. So while the book starts off slow, and there are many pages where very little seems to happen, by the end you are entirely gripped and pulled along by the story as it becomes almost a thriller; the downward spiral of a broken man.

The plot shifts about in time and space – as well as through different layers of fiction – and builds up a history of Kinder, throwing together fact and fiction in a rather pleasing way. The tales told could all be real, and maybe they are. Not the darker aspects, one hopes, but one never knows. The book does get darker as it progresses, and is rather twisted, but the payoff is excellent and there’s no question that it’s been a wild ride that was well worth stepping onto. It’s chilling, haunting and all those words that cause goosebumps to erupt on your flesh.

Either you’ll like it, or you won’t, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you will.

If you’d like to read my first novel, The Atomic Blood-Stained Bus (and, frankly, why wouldn’t you?) then head on over to Amazon where it’s available now for all ebook platforms.

“Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury (1962)

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”

After the last book, this was the only thing that could sensibly follow it up. It’s not a book I owned and therefore had ready, but I happened to pass it in a bookshop while out with By The Pricking Of My Thumbs in my bag, and couldn’t let the opportunity pass me by. Bradbury skipped ahead over all the other books waiting patiently on my shelf, but I’m sure few of them minded – Bradbury is, of course, a genius writer of the highest order.

In this absurdly creepy novel, we find two thirteen-year-old boys, Will Halloway – obedient and wary – and his best friend and neighbour, Jim Nightshade – brash and seeking adventure all the time. They are warned by a lightning-rod seller that a storm is coming to town, but instead of a storm, instead a circus arrives.

Cooger and Dark’s Pandenonium Shadow Show arrives one night to Green Town and Will and Jim are there to see the train pull in, with a calliope playing itself. In the darkness, the circus sets itself up and the following morning its rides and sideshows are full of people desperate to see what it has in store. But Jim gets too curious and after trespassing on a broken carousel, he and Will fall foul of Mr Cooger and Mr Dark themselves, who reveal the true power of the carousel, begin to promise them all they could ever dream of, and show themselves to be people who are very difficult to say no to.

Now caught up in a chase, Will and Jim must hide from Mr Dark and his assorted freaks, with only Will’s father Charles any the wiser that anything is going on. He begins to research the carnival, to protect the boys and find a way to rid Green Town of this malicious threat forever. That is, if the temptations of the circus don’t drag him in first.

Bradbury has always been creepy, but this is the first time I’ve read a book of his that is out-and-out horror. He is a master of scene setting and with just a few choice words, you find yourself tugged into the dark and windy streets of Green Town. You race with Will and Jim and your heart changes pace along with theirs. There feels like there is real magic woven between the words of this novel, as Bradbury shows us terrible, horrifying things and we blithely go along with them.

Charles, Will’s father, is a particularly amazing character, a man who feels too old to relate to his son, but who isn’t afraid to lie and decieve when necessary to save the lives of those he loves, even if it means putting his own in danger. This is a book of people pining for their innermost wishes, and what happens to the people who find those wishes granted. The freaks are a myriad of creepy characters, in particular the Dust Witch who has her eyes stitched up, but is still able to sense her surroundings with unexplained magic.

I actually liked the first half of the book better than the second, but that might be because the threat is more distant at that point, and less clear. As we learnt again from last week’s episode of Doctor Who, the remarkable “Listen”, nothing is scarier than something. In fact, I’ll leave you with the words of Charles Halloway himself.

“…[T]he carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But … Nothing? Where do you hit it? Has it a heart, soul, butt-behind, brain? No, no. So the carnival just shakes a great croupier’s cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back head-over-heels in fright.”

“Come Closer” by Sara Gran (2003)

Look into my eyes, don’t look around the eyes…

“In January I had a proposal due to my boss, Leon Fields, on a new project.”

Suggested by a horror loving friend and colleague, Come Closer seems to be billed as the scariest novel ever. George Pelecanos says, “days after finishing it, it has not left my mind”. Kathryn Davis says it left her “so profoundly disturbed, so terrified and sleepless”. Brett Easton Ellis even weighs in and calls it a “genuinely scary novel”.

In my opinion, the blurb oversells this book immensely.

This is the story of Amanda, a normal, content woman who lives with her husband Ed in a converted loft and has a good job as an architect for a small firm. She wants for nothing and is very happy with her lot in life. But then the pair start hearing a tapping in the walls. They assume it’s a mouse and leave it, but then Ed realises that he never hears it when Amanda is out – it can’t be a mouse.

Amanda then finds herself urged to take up smoking again, and the dog she has befriended at the train station has begun to ignore her and refuses the treats she offers it. Amanda’s life begins to spiral out of control and she finds herself unable to withhold herself from fulfilling some of her deeper desires. And then there are the creepy dreams on the shore of a red lake with a woman who calls herself Naamah…

Granted, the book spins off in a way that I didn’t at all expect, but once it had, I stopped being scared. It’s certainly creepy, and I can’t fault Gran’s writing which is precise and elegant, but I certainly didn’t find it as terrifying as I assumed I was going to. It’s a quick read for anyone who enjoys thrillers, but don’t go in assuming you’re going to get a big scare. I’d suggest that I’m desensitised to these things, but I’m not a big horror fan by any stretch of the imagination, so I don’t think it’s that. I just think there are scarier things in the world than what’s in here.