#Review - A Pair of Nightjars

Cover photo by Nicholas Royle

Tower Block Ghost Story
TSJ Harling
Nightjar Press, April 2021
Available as: PB, 16pp
Source: Subscription
ISBN: 9781907341533

 

My Nightjar Press subscription is one of my favourite things I've spent money on recently, providing me with regular short stories told from a variety of viewpoints and across genres, but always beautifully written, sharp and with that sense of haunting the imagination, even after you have finished reading. Here are two that I've read recently.

Doing just what it says on the cover, Tower Block Ghost Story abandons traditional gothic trappings, placing its brilliantly-paced narrative of unease and unrest into a setting of concrete stairwells, urine-smelling lifts and double front door locks.

Here Sade is living with her 'handsome boyfriend' and with fibromyalgia, sometimes only managing to move between the bed ands the sofa. She's alone in the flat most of the time, so she notice things.

Sounds. Items out of place. Sudden draughts.

The supernatural is introduced in a rather matter-of-fact way - from the first sentence - so we know what to expect. But we DON'T know what to expect, as Sade picks away to discover what - or who - is sharing her living space with her. Drawing out the tension from page to page, Harling keeps the reader on the hook almost to the end, delivering a superbly creepy and empathetic glimpse of the supernatural, more disturbing for the contrast with the absolutely mundane - with the real hooks of the horror the link with everyday, not supernatural, evil.

Cover photo by Nicholas Royle

The Elevator

Imogen Reid

Nightjar Press, April 2021

Available as: PB, 11pp

Source: Subscription

ISBN: 9781907341557

The Elevator has a haunting beauty all of its own. Opening with the (never named) narrator entering the elevator of the title, pursued (perhaps) by a staggering man, we feel their need for escape even if not understanding why. 

The escape is a journey illuminated by fluorescent lights, surrounded by metallic surfaces, accompanied hints of blood (whose?) and by that pursuer, who seems to be following the lift on a surrounding spiral staircase. The claustrophobic atmosphere inside gives way to memories of a room which seems the elevator's twin, descriptions, features and memories of one echoing the other.

There is a story here - told in glimpses of memory, the contents of a bag strewn over the floor of the lift, the recollection of an old Bakelite telephone - but it's presented in dreamlike logic, or as a puzzle to be worked over.

Deeply atmospheric, this story seemed poised between noirish atmosphere and a clinging, almost Gothic, atmosphere of horror and entrapment (will the narrator ever get away or do they remain in a loop?) It gave me a lot to think about, but even more to feel.

You can buy Tower Block Ghost Story from Nightjar Press here and The Elevator here.

 

#Review - What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo

Design by Julia Lloyd

What Big Teeth

Rose Szabo

Titan, 6 July 2021

Available as: PB, 352pp, e

Source: Advance copy from publisher

ISBN(PB): 9781789097818

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of What Big Teeth to consider for review.

Titles can misdirect, and the suggestion from this one that Szabo's horror-novel-with-feelings is a modern take on a fairytale rather undersells what the book actually does. It is I think rather more complicated. Yes, there are wolfish creatures here, and a grandmother (in fact, two). Yes, those creatures can and will eat you, and yes, in a sense Eleanor Zarrin is an innocent when she returns to her family home after years of exile, and she does risk ending up a morsel. 

BUT

I found myself comparing the setup here with other, perhaps less likely, forerunners. What Big Teeth is in some respect I think also a clever twist on - of all things Cold Comfort Farm (and of course the breathy rural romances it was parodying). Young Eleanor, who has been out in the wider world, arrives home without a role or place in the family and the one she eventually adopts is of taking on responsibilities, offering help, and putting things right. She has a real sense of duty, impressive given she was sent away to a Roman Catholic boarding school her time at which has washed her memory of most of what she knew about her family. The separation was, it emerges, not accidental but engineered - a puzzle and cause of guilt to Eleanor.

One might actually think that Eleanor is very ill-suited to manage, and in her eyes save, the ragged family she encounters when she arrives home, and indeed things don't work out well at all. The family is a collection of grotesques, inhabiting a tumbledown house above Winterport, on the coast of Maine. Grandma Persephone, who earns the family's living growing poisonous bulbs in her greenhouse. Older sister Luma. Cousin Rhys and Grandpa Miklos. Eleanor's mother, who spends most of her time submerged in a variety of tubs and baths, lest her skin dry out. And close family friend Arthur, who comes and goes as he wishes but seems under some kind of constraint or control (there are things he literally can't talk about).

It is from one perspective, a family of monsters, a real Addams Family, feared by the town, living in a big spooky house full of hidden passages and apt to go howling through the woods on a whim. From another perspective, they're a big, slightly dysfunctional, combative group of eccentrics with many secrets who have to hold their ground against a hostile modern world.

As she tries to come to terms with what, and who, she is, and to discover how the family works, so she can save them, Eleanor finds that she actually knows very little - even taking account of what she forgot. Feeling obliged to take on a central role after an untoward death, she reaches out for help, but may just have made things worse...

I loved this book. A mystery wrapped in a horror story inside a coming-of-age novel, and exploring themes of being different, of responsibility and of confronting guilt for what those who came before us did, it delicately paints a whole world. There are hints and references to wider genre themes - those townsfolk are perfectly capable of breaking out the pitchforks and torches, right? And Grandpa Miklos's origin story back in the silent Old Country has distinct echoes of classic horror. But Szabo doesn't let themself be tied down by fussiness over types of monster or that urban fantasy thing where there is an established and known order to magic and mystery. Everything here is vague, raw, dangerous and an untamed. 

In What Big Teeth, some characters know things. But they don't know as much as they think, and some of it is wrong. Any broader supernatural society is mysterious, and likely as much a threat as the townsfolk. There's a reason for the Zarrins being hidden away in a remote settingt, far from the world. Even the year is unclear - there was been a War in Europe but I'm not sure if it was the First or the Second - we are in a cultural space which could fit almost any year from 1920 to 1955. The vagueness reinforces the feeling of isolation, of having nothing and nobody to resort to or trust, leaving Eleanor very much on her own in trying to put right what's happened.

An entertaining, creepy and satisfying slice of horror, genuinely different and great fund to read.

For more information about What Big Teeth, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Catalyst Gate by Megan E O'Keefe

Catalyst Gate (The Protectorate, 3)
Megan E O'Keefe
Orbit, 24 June 2021
Available as: PB, 608pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy provided by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9780356512259

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Catalyst gate, via #NetGalley.

Catalyst Gate is the third book in The Protectorate trilogy (after Velocity Weapon and Chaos Vector). The Protectorate is absolutely the kind of trilogy you need to read in order and if you haven't read the others, and you want to understand whether to read the trilogy, you need to go back to my earlier reviews and not read on here because spoilers. (Hint: you should read the trilogy).

If you've been following The Protectorate you will almost certainly want to read the third part, so part of me wonders what I'm actually doing in this review. I often have this with trilogies, and my answer is basically (1) How well is the author closing off her sequence - does this book stand comparison well with the others? (2) How good is the trilogy overall?

Taking these questions in order, my answer to the first would be, VERY WELL. There are a lot of moving parts in The Protectorate. The story follows Sanda, a commander of the Fleet who's been through all kinds of weird stuff; experimented on by a hostile power; deceived by the first incarnation of the AI known as Bero into believing that her world has been smashed and that she has been marooned in deep space for decades; romanced by plausible rogue, spy-for-hire and, potentially, artificial lifeform, Tomas; framed for an assassination and hunted by her own side; and much more besides. It follows Sanda's brother Biran, a rising politician and Keeper in The Protectorate, who has discovered that its history and politics and a lot less pure that he believed. There was also the group of gutter rats who, for most of the first two books, were coping with the consequences of their disastrous heist-gone-wrong, as a result of which their leader Jules has become the loosest of loose cannons, allying with the alien entity known as Rainer.

In this third book O'Keefe deftly takes forward all these main protagonists (and more). She still has plenty to say about them all - we aren't just going through the motions - even as Rainier's endgame approaches. There are further surprises, and a series of calculated risks taken by all involved. Things kick off very quickly at the beginning of the book - there is no lengthy recap, but O'Keefe still manages to keep the reader in the frame about backstory and motivations so that the story develops organically and everyone feels "real". Yes, there were a few (a very few) exceptions, when I asked myself "why did he/ she do that?" but I feel that is inevitable in any sequence of this length.

As well as the characters, we are still learning more about this universe and its history. This is far-future SF, following humanity long after it has left Earth, and it turns out there are secrets to be told about that whole history. Topically they're bound up with the originals of "Prime Inventive", which I had always seen as a society but which is actually the descendant of a private company - the one which happened to win out in the contest to explore space. Firmly believing that nothing good can come from over-mighty corporations, I wasn't surprised to learn there'd been dirty work at the crossroads and that it involved the alien tech whose origin and purpose has been a prominent theme through this trilogy. And yes, we finally discover more about that too. 

I am, I think, moving on to my question (2) above and my answer is that while each part of this trilogy has been very good indeed, the whole has a kind of commonality and progression which makes it more than the sum of the three parts. Seen together, these books present questions - and warnings - about our stewardship not only of this planet but of the wider Universe, about loyalty, the nature of humanity and the corruptions of politics. In some ways the most human characters we meet here are composed of bits and bytes or of naneites; or are unregarded outsiders or junior players. The gilded priesthood of the Keepers shows a tendency to guile and self-interest rather than the common good, making it ten times harder to deal with the threat of Rainier and that's not an aberration but totally in keeping with the history and politics of Prime. In contrast, Sanda and her Fleeties, the rogues and criminals of the Grotta, Bero and Tomas, have a sense of humility and fragility that fires their suffering into strength and integrity. As O'Keefe writes of Sanda, 'Those pressures collided against the woman... compressed her, made her as hard and immovable as the deep ice...'

O'Keefe integrates these themes and makes her three novels into a single, coherent whole, no easy task in such a vast story, creating an absorbing and convincing world with compelling characters whose stories are told with humour and grit. I'd unreservedly recommend the sequence, if you've been waiting to see how it would turn out, and Catalyst Gate as its culmination.

For more information about Catalyst Gate, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

Notes From The Burning Age
Claire North
Orbit, 22 July 2021
Available as: HB, 403pp, e, audio 
Source: ARC kindly provided free by the publisher
ISBN(HB): 9780356514758

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance review copy of Notes from the Burning Age to read and consider for review.

Before I start this review I should probably declare a bias - I adore Claire North's books and I've been loving her novels exploring individuals with weird abilities, or curses. Notes from the Burning Age is a little different, featuring ordinary people albeit in a weird future, but I still came to it expecting brilliance and I wasn't disappointed. 

Fiction reflecting and commenting on the environmental catastrophe being visited right now on the planet has never been more important... or harder to do.  Given the scale of what is happening, there is a sense in which all future, or near future, set fiction must be climate/ environmental fiction. But authors face challenges. Make it unremittingly gloomy, and readers might stay away. But implying it's a trivial problem, easily solved, would be reckless and unrealistic.

In Notes from the Burning Age, North finds an ingenious solution. The book is set some way in the future - hundreds of years - in an era when people can look back to our "burning age" and judge it. From that perspective, they can report the catastrophe, but without living it. We can also see that, despite losses, humankind has found ways to mitigate its impact on the planet, limitations to prevent a repeat of the disaster. The book is full of fascinating detail about these, from dependence on bicycles and electric vehicles and use of solar, wind and tidal power, to building techniques using reasons instead of cement to a system of religion and ethics intended to stress interdependence with nature. This is propagated by the Medj priesthood, who 'bowed to each tree in turn and made libations to the kakuy whose gift they were receiving'.

This elusive concept of the kakuy is key to the civilization depicted here. Perhaps gods, perhaps demons, perhaps innate spirits of the forests, the mountains, the seas, the kakuy may be a pious myth, a real and ferocious force that rose in anger when humans defaced the earth, or a personification of the chaos and harm that came from that defacement. The Medj teaching is focussed on not rousing them again - if gods, they are gods who have no regard for Mankind, regarding us an irritant at best. Ancient religions flourish alongside this cult - at one point a character is rescued and sheltered by a Jewish community, and the domes on ancient mosques and churches still stand over the city of Isdanbul - but they are peripheral. 

Ven, the main character in Notes from the Burning Age, is a disgraced former member of the Medj, but hedges his bets about the kakuy. Others, ambitious men (mostly) who chafe under the limitations imposed following the Burning, do not believe, or actively despise the idea. Humanity is paramount, they insist, and only harm can come from denying that essential fact. The book, then, looks both back - at our burning age - and forward - at a potential future one, as humanity, like a dog returning to its vomit, forgets lessons learned and plots harm again. We see this as environmental destruction, seemingly undertaken to demonstrate human mastery, gathers pace. The story, from one perspective, is therefore a set of notes from the "future" burning age, to ours.

Located in Central Europe, the story depicts a loose federation of seven provinces supposedly united under a Council to ensure that "heresies" (the use of destructive, historic technologies) stay suppressed. It isn't clear whether similar conditions obtain elsewhere - there are brief mentions of the 'Anglaes islands' and their 'purity laws' and of an 'Amerika' with 'militia forts'. The the province of Maze is however flexing its strength, overturning the laws adopted for safety and to prevent the kakuy rising. Ven is close to that process, having fetched up as personal assistant to Georg Mestri, the power behind the Brotherhood, a social and political force dedicated to human potential (and to founding an empire with Maze at its head). 

Despite his background in the Medj, Ven comes to admire Georg, for whom he translates ancient documents, stolen by the Brotherhood, describing banned technologies (and including a lot of other rubbish scoured from ancient hard drives - Ven's background has given him some skill in recognising what might be useful). More "notes", this time from our "burning age" to the future one. From this position Ven's able to describe the rapid slide of Maze into militaristic dictatorship and then war, and the progress of espionage between the two sides, espionage that may make the difference in an otherwise uneven war. The book has plenty of excitement, with a mole hunt going on, conflicted loyalties, and a lot at risk on either side. That makes it a pacey and exciting read, even as North refuses to skimp detail of the environmental damage done in our time, and which is starting up again. Her descriptions of shrines made from ancient, sea-washed plastics, of part-ancient, part reconstructed buildings or of simply Medj shrines, and always arresting and often beautiful.

Hovering over everything in Notes from the Burning Age are moral choices, the foremost of which is perhaps, how much damage must one accept to preserve peace? In this book the environmentally sensitive way of life of the other provinces is threatened by Maze's revanchism. Will the other provinces receive enough warning? If they do, will they be willing too act?  Indeed, how can they act when they believe that warfare will wake the kakuy and bring ruin again? Again, placing the action in the future makes the story more palatable since it isn't finger-pointing at us, here, now - even if in reality we face similar dilemmas.

Notes from the Burning Age shows how these choices are inescapable, and perhaps, that there are no good options. It's chock full of ideas, and North is able to paint even her villains as sympathetic (in a certain light) and her heroes as distinctly tarnished, ambiguous types. The dialogue is often brilliant (it always is in this author's books, but even so, here it's superb) with several layers of subtext to the conversations, and the action-y parts of the book (of which there are many) have the urgency and pace of a thriller. 

In short, I think Notes from the Burning Age is a joy to read, and shows North evolving as an author to address difficult themes as well as serving up a rollicking good story. I would strongly recommend it.

For more information about Notes From The Burning Age see the publisher's website here or any of the stops on the tour poster below.

You can buy Notes From The Burning Age from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - a strange and brilliant light by Eli Lee

a strange and brilliant light
Eli Lee
Jo Fletcher Books, 22 July 2021 (HB), 17 February 2022 (PB)
Available as: HB, PB, 292pp, e, audio
Source: Advance review copy kindly provided by the publisher
ISBN(HB): 9781529407754 (PB) 9781529407747  

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of a strange and brilliant light to read and consider for review.

Sometimes, to see plainly, to understand just how strange things have becomes, you have to step back a bit. 

That, I think, is what Eli Lee does in her riveting SF(ish) novel about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and its effect on society - or perhaps, society's effect on society, because nothing is inevitable, it all depends what WE do.

The book is set in a recognisably modern world with laptops, the Internet, cars, trains, coaches - and poverty. Teenagers meet for parties in the sanddunes and do slightly naughty things. There are coffeeshops and trades unions, venture capital startups, conglomerates, and meditation retreats in the mountains.

But it is not OUR world. The geography, place names (Dhont, Mejira) and countries are clearly different, as is the history (which is alluded to but never explained - this book is very good at involving its readers without a great deal of exposition). There is no made-up language but Lee coolly uses comprehensible but not familiar English words such as 'unancestral' to hint at unseen depths, at concepts and structures shaping the visible narrative. Most tangibly, the different cultures we meet here have their own cuisines, with meals - both traditional and intercultural - described in, frankly, delicious detail. Overall, the effect is to distance the reader slightly from the locations and action, so that we question what is being shown and think about what is happening (and what we're taking for granted).

In Lee's imagined society, we are on the cusp of AI automating most of the work hitherto carried out by humans. The focus is on a chain of coffee shops, Slurpees, where "auts" are being introduced to replace human staff - early on we meet Lal, who is about to transfer from her job as manager of one such shop to a more senior position in the company, where she will be helping to plan future automation. This transformation is proceeding, at pace, without much thought being given by Government or there conglomerates to the consequences - that is, how people will make a living. Things are, I'd say, closer to the edge than in our world - but it's a matter of degree.

As the story moves on, Rose, one of Lal's team, takes on the managership. More concerned than Lal at what is happening, she attends protest meetings, falling in with the surprisingly uncharismatic Alek who leads the group but doesn't seem to regard the members as having much to contribute apart from their numbers. He might be a radical and agitator, but he's making the same mistake as the big corporations in discounting the input of actual humans, reducing even the activity of process to an assembly-line of placards. (Perhaps they could get auts in to do that, too?)

Alek knows what he thinks the solution is - something he calls 'source gain', what we'd describe as universal basic income, an entitlement for all to part of the fruits of automation, enabling a minimal, tolerable lifestyle. Rose seems less committed and more questioning of this concept - late in the book she lights on the idea of ownership, by the people, of the means of production (the auts). So, yes, there's Socialism in this alternate world - and indeed we get a good description of the alienation of the workers from their labour. But there are other ideas in the mix, too - wider elements in the protest movement are taking direct action, smashing the auts. 

I thought that Rose's and Alek's protest meetings might be highlighting the dangers of an unstable society becoming more authoritarian, as they seem to occur clandestinely in a remote abandoned warehouse - but this is not really followed up and on the whole I don't think a strange and brilliant light is meant as a novel of political action. It's rather one where the wider forces in society are played out between a few characters and within their families. This comes across most strongly in the third central character, Janetta, who completes the picture by giving an insider's view on the progress of AI itself.

Janetta is a PhD student at a prestigious university (contrasted with the local college which was all Rose could afford to attend, despite having higher aspirations) worked on making AI empathetic, considered a key step to developing conscious artificial intelligence. She's also going through emotional turmoil, having split up with her girlfriend. Lee has a twist of fate link Janetta up with the founder of one of the top AI start-ups, so allowing a dialogue between Janetta's approach to the AI problem, informed by her loss of Malin, and Taly's more functional attitude.

The relationships between the three women, their wider families and the workplace, played out over job changes (a particular grim description of Lal's arrival at a dream corporate campus, the antithesis of all her hopes and dreams), holidays and meet-ups, creates a fascinating tapestry of life which, yes, serves to illustrate the dilemmas and risks of the new technology but at the same time is simply riveting to follow. The process of automation is marked by the progressive elimination of people from Slurpees, while Lal's supposedly favoured management position becomes more and more dehumanising and Janetta finds her progress frustrated by relationship entanglements and doubts over the ethics of what it's doing.

In what is actually quite a short book, Lee gives the reader a massive amount to ponder as well as delivering a brilliantly written and absorbing story about some very real people.

I would unreservedly recommend a strange and brilliant light.

For more information about a strange and brilliant light, see this blogpost by the author, explaining the inspiration behind the book and the publisher's website here.

#Review - A Radical Act of Free Magic by HG Parry

Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio

A Radical Act of Free Magic
HG Parry
Orbit, 22 July 2021
Available as: PB, 495pp, e
Source e: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9780356514710

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for an advance copy A Radical Act of Free Magic to consider for review.

Following last year's A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, A Radical Act of Free Magic completes Parry's Shadow Histories dualogy, taking us back to the early 19th century, to revolts by enslaved people in the Caribbean, debates over abolition in Britain, and revolution in France. Again we meet William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister, and William Wilberforce, abolitionist and simply the nicest man in fiction. And Fina, who has freed herself and joined the revolt on the island of Saint Domingue. And - a newcomer - Napoleon Bonaparte, who is about to take a hand in French affairs.

And, of course, the Stranger. The Enemy. The puppet master pulling everyone's strings, shaping events, offering help here and there only to withdraw it again when he's got what he wants.

The atmosphere is, I would say, darker than the first book. The revolt led by Toussaint Louverture on Saint Domingue met with success, but was then opposed with unmitigated savagery by the British. The British are nevertheless being driven back, but Fina's dream of spreading freedom to Jamaica seems as forlorn as ever. In Britain, the efforts of the abolitionists are making no progress. Pitt's health is failing, his enormous workload and magical affliction undermining his constitution. The French Revolution, which seemed to herald liberty for the oppressed magicians of Europe, has drowned its makers in blood. 

Against this background, realpolitik plays out, idealistic dreams compromising with raw power. There are betrayals, disappointments and fresh dangers as war sweeps Europe. And worse, the friendship between Pitt and "Wilber" seems to have broken down under the weight of those betrayals. That friendship, at the heart of the first book, had sustained the two men in the darkest of times and Parry's portrayal of it crumbling - her sympathy for both, and her account of their estrangement - is actually very moving. It's part of the delicate dance she does with history, preserving, as far as I can see, most actual events while giving them a whole new significance. So for example, Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was not a defeat of an actual invasion fleet carrying troops but of a naval force that might have joined and led such a fleet. And no, the French and Spanish fleets didn't have the supernatural support of a... well, no spoilers, you'll have to read on to find out what. 

A story that involves magic and monsters can, obviously, take liberties, but the human stories here - whether about Pitt and Wilberforce, or enslaved people taking their liberty in their own hands - are still true and affecting, a reminder that history is about people and that those people aren't simple.

It's also, and perhaps this is more important in the end, a thumping good tale, one that holds the reader's attention throughout. Even when the ostensible subject is two middle aged white men in an office, every sentence, every word builds up a rounded portrait of their relationship, dramatising the tension between different notions of duty, between the needs of friendship and the needs - perhaps - of country, of wider humanity. It it as much a moral narrative as one of events, as it should be, because in fantasy, as in life, the ultimate questions come down not to cleverness and skill but in the end to morality, good and evil, strength of will and courage - which are strange characteristics, you might think, for middle aged white men in an office but which matter here a lot.

Above all, in re-presenting this period of history, Parry has brought so many things together. At a time in history when slavers' statutes are falling (I hope they will continue to fall!) and British history is being challenged to retell its darker stories, the two books in this duopoly show how global events weave together, how the Napoleonic Wars are about more than "hearts of oak", Nelson and the Duke of Wellington (actually, he's not on the scene yet). In doing that she does a real service to the truth, even though in fiction.

In summary - gosh, this was good. I could read more instalments of this story, if parry were to write them, but I suspect it will stop here, and that's probably right. I'll watch eagerly, instead, for what she does next.

For more information about A Radical Act of Free Magic, see the publisher's website here.

#BlogTour #Review - Good Neighbours by Sarah Langan

Good Neighbours

Sarah Langan

Titan Books, 13 July 2021

Available as: PB, 400pp, e

Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher

ISBN(PB): 9781789098211

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance e-copy of Good Neighbours and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Taking place during a freakishly hot summer in the late 2020s, Langan's new novel is written as looking back a couple of decades to report on the famous scandal which engulfed Maple Street, an idyllic suburban community in Garden City, Long Island. The scandal - a couple of weeks of rising hysteria and mayhem leading eventually to... well... read the book to find out - is presented as something which is widely known, often written about, and which continues to fascinate. 

The text is scattered with passages from popular retellings, press cuttings, and interviews with the participants but this is for scene setting, rather than being a presentation of a confused and contradictory narrative for the reader to resolve. We're not left to piece things together, the main narrative gives a more-or-less straight account of what happened. The "viewpoint" pieces do though serve a secondary purpose, showing how some of those present have constructed a false and misleading narrative to which they will stick regardless of the known facts.

Good Neighbours is, in essence, the story of two families, the educated and comfortable Schroeders (mum Rhea, dad Fritz, and kids FJ, Shelly and Ella) and their more raffish next door neighbours the Wildes - Gertie, Arlo and their children Julia and Larry. The Wildes are recent arrivals in Paradise and have rough manners which don't fit with Maple Street: Arlo smokes, for goodness' sake, and he turns out to be a washed-up rock musician who has (or had) substance issues. Gertie is a former beauty queen with a troubled family background which makes her volatile at times. And Julia, well, Julia is "fast".

As the story opens, we're about to see the fractures in Maple Street open up - metaphorically, as hard words are exchanged at the 4 July party and literally, as a sinkhole appears in the park where the party is  being held. Worse is to follow - a death, accusations levied by neighbour against neighbour, backed up by a frenzied pack of kids, and the unspooling of an apparently solid marriage.

I had the feeling that Langan was rather enjoying laying the foundations for all this, leading us up to the final catastrophe while introducing hints of backstory, showing how characters who seem to have it all together may, in reality, be rather teetering on the edge (metaphoric falls come rather naturally in this book!) It would be spoilery to say too much about this, but I was impressed by how credible this background was, giving someone who might easily have been portrayed as simply a monster a lot of depth, logic and even pathos. 

A major theme here is misunderstanding. Sometimes this is from genuine incomprehension of another's background, feelings and motives, of which there is plenty (and we see all sides, empathising when it arises from someone's sense of inadequacy or perception that others won't side with them). Sometimes, it results from deception - but that isn't always to excuse it, there are those who are ready to be deceived, ready to judge, to excuse shocking behaviour in themselves and others even when they know it is unwarranted. (There is more than a hint of Salem in Garden City). There is also a lot of self-misunderstanding (or self-deception) both on the negative side but also the positive: many here are in reality more resilient, braver and just better than they'd have thought.

The stresses and cracks in the little community are counterpointed by that sinkhole, which is always a bit mysterious, and by the ground beginning to ooze bitumen, which coats everything, is trodden indoors, snares small animals and birds and fills lungs with its coolly smell. Even electronics is affected, semi-isolating the suffering community. Inevitably, given the portrait we have of this group of people, rather than uniting the community this natural(?) catastrophe just leads the parents to further rounds of accusations, denunciations and greater flights of fancy and blame. Not that they seem to need much reason for these - the barrel of gunpowder was, we gradually come to understand, long in place. The sinkhole is perhaps not a narrative device that is necessary to drive the plot, but it does add a distinct touch of the unheimlich to this story of very human failings, a hint that the times are out of joint, chiming with the ominous hints which a story looking back from the mid decades of the century can plausibly deploy.

An enjoyable book, which gets more and more tense as it reaches its conclusion and one which gave me that genuine sense, as I tuned the pages, that I wanted to know what happened next - but that I was also frightened to discover it.

For more information about the book, see the poster below for other stops on the blogtour. Or look at the Titan website here.

You can buy Good Neighbours ours from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop dot org, Hive Books, Blackwells, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.