The Chalk Man – CJ Tudor

To say this is a debut novel… well, wow, there’s a lot to this tightly plotted, strongly characterised novel.

It centres on Eddie, the narrator, who is looking back in his early forties at events that took place in his small town when he was a you teenager.

It begins with a terrible accident when a girl is horrifically injured when a fairground breaks mid-ride. Eddie helps the girl with the guidance of a mysterious new teacher, Mr Halloran, who falls, entirely inappropriately, in love with her. She is eventually murdered and it’s Eddie that finds her decapitated body.

The book centres on Eddie trying to unravel what happened, moving between his investigations years later in his 40s and the events 20-odd years earlier.

And a LOT happens in this novel: inappropriate relationships, religious cults, great friendship groups, mysterious chalk drawings, bullying, murder, mistaken identities, unknown children, early onset dementia, and much more.

Although it’s ultimately a thriller, there are some heartwarming elements to this novel. The characters in particular are really well drawn – Eddie in particular is likeable because of his honesty, his group of friends when he’s younger (Hoppo, Mickey, Gav and Nickey) are a nostalgic portrayal of early teen friendship before its damaged by the realities of life, and more than anyone, Chloe, Eddie’s lodger who turns out to be a lot more than she seems.

At the heart of The Chalk Man, though, is a look at the effects of childhood trauma. Eddie experiences some horrific losses, and witnesses terrible things. They are unresolved at the time and so its no surprise that twenty years later he’s struggling to live a full life: still in his hometown living in his old house with no relationships to speak of. And it’s not just Eddie: Chloe, Gav, Hoppo… all are broken by their earlier experiences.

And at the same time, the book is also a look at memory: Eddie remembers much of what happened back then, but not all. Sometimes he’s guessing at events, other times he’s making it up, and occasionally he seems to be putting certain occurrences down to supernatural forces – in particular the Chalk Man himself, Mr Halloran, when in fact the explanation for what happened back then is very much based on natural causes.

Alongside these big themes is an exploration of some interesting sub themes. Growing up in a small town and the tenderness and tensions of teenage friendship groups are woven throughout the novel.

Our Share of Night – Mariana Enriquez

This is an epic piece of politically-charged gothic horror. It’s unrelentingly bleak, filled with supernatural and all-too-natural evil. I loved it – the characters, the atmosphere, the plot – but was repulsed at the same time.

It follows the life of a young boy, Gaspar. He’s the son of Juan and Rosario. Rosario is the daughter of an elite Argentinian family, the Bradfords, who have found fortune in the past and maintained it through dark magic, using a medium to commune with the dead and offering sacrifices in order to achieve immortality. They form a secret society named the Order. Juan is a medium who the family try to use (and abuse) in order to access the darkness. They require him to do horrific things, allow him little freedom and condemn him to a short, violent life.

Juan doesn’t know whether he’s passed on the gift to Gaspar, and commits a lot of atrocious violence towards his son in order to protect him, but it turns out it’s in vain – Gaspar has the gift too.

The first part of the novel sees Gaspar trying to live with his father after the death of his mother; his father is on the verge of death too, leaves his son to fend for himself much of the time, but at others subjecting him to abuse designed to protect him from the darkness he will inevitably confront as a medium. Gaspar is incredulous, unhappy, has no idea why his father treats him like this. And the reader, too, is left surprised by how callous, secretive and abusive Juan is towards his only son who he almost certainly loves.

We then move forward a few years when Juan and Gaspar have settled in a neighbourhood where Gaspar has managed to make some friends – Vicky, Pablo and Adela. At times this section feels like a coming-of-age novel, almost happy at times, but it ends in the only way this book could, with death and torment for Gaspar.

Enriquez flits about further, going back to Rosario’s charmed time in London before she got together with Juan and later, when Gaspar is living with Juan’s brother, Luis, and his family. All this time the Order are searching for Gaspar, wanting to trap him and use him, as they had Juan at times, and other mediums before him. 

I can’t say too much more without giving the plot or too many details away. But there’s so much to Our Share of Night – the horrific Bradford family, their stealing of children who they mutilate and imprison in their search for mediums and sacrifices, classic haunted house tropes, moments of warmth and love, plot twists and surprise connections between characters, revelations about some of the main characters that make you look at them in completely different ways, moments of stomach-churning body horror, cinema-esque depictions of the darkness, and so much more…

On one level you can – and I think should – read this big novel as a piece of classic supernatural horror. It contains all the hallmarks. It’s also got the essentials of body horror throughout, and at times a ghost story or haunted house feel to it. You can’t say it’s one thing, but it offers some of the main sub-genres all in one book. For that alone it’s worth reading.

On another level you could read this book about the relationships between parents and kids. “They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad” as Larkin put it some years ago. There’s Juan’s abusive relationship towards Gaspar. There’s Rosario’s twisted, possessed family who most likely had her killed. There’s Gaspar’s friends, all of whom are broken in some way by their parents. Almost no parent-child relationship comes out of this book well.

You can, most importantly I think, read this as a novel about the ‘dirty war’ waged against anyone associated with the left in 1970s and early 1980s Argentina, after Peron was overthrown by a military junta. Up to 30,000 people are said to have been ‘disappeared’ during that period. This book, set primarily in the 1980s and early 1990s deals with that head-on. Some of the characters have family and friends who have disappeared, and are fearful of it happening to them. And the many children stolen and sacrificed the Order in their bid to maintain their own power feels analogous to this history. Enriquez does not draw this crudely or explicitly; she doesn’t equate the too, but there are supernaturally motivated and politically motivated disappearances through Our Share of Night.

And, finally, you could argue this book is about the elite, not just in Argentina but everywhere. Their success, their wealth, their power – it depends on the exploitation and abuse of others in order to achieve and maintain their position. Without their mediums and their sacrifices The Order would be gone. Likewise, without their workers or the ravaged environment, the financial elite would be no more.

The Promise – Damon Galgut

It took me a couple of attempts to start Damon Galgut’s The Promise. I think it was the style which at first feels like it jumps about from one character’s perspective to another, one paragraph after another; but actually, after only a small amount of perseverance, that style really is the power of this astonishing novel.

It’s a story about a white South African family – the Swarts – over several decade, from pre- to post-Apartheid. And it’s structured around the deaths of most of the family members. Not in a horror or crime fiction way, but as a device for exploring the behaviours and attitudes of the family and those surrounding them.

In the opening section Ma dies of an illness, and we meet her husband Manie and three children, Anton, Astrid and Amor, as well as various relatives.

From the opening pages the tense relationships between the family members become clear, partly animated by a promise which the youngest child, Amor, says she heard her Ma make to Salome, their black housekeeper before she died – a promise to give Salome the deeds to the house in which she lives. Amore implores her family to respect this promise but Pa denies any knowledge of it, and for decades the promise is ignored.

As the years go by, the other characters die – Pa, then Astrid and then Anton. Each time the Swarts’ come together for a difficult funeral and few days at the farm before moving back to their separate lives. Only at the end, when the rest of her immediately family is gone, does Amore follow through on the promise that has driven her since the death of her Ma over thirty years ago – and when it happens the gift of the deeds is far from clear-cut or accepted by Salome’s son in the way Amore might have originally hoped it would have done.

As I say, the power of this book is in the style – the way Galgut shifts between different protagonists’ perspectives, sometimes from one paragraph to the next, sometimes dwelling on a character for a number of pages. We get all the main Swarts family members, but we also get the bit-players in the story, right from the pastor who plays a big part in their life over the decades (taking their funerals, building a church on their land, receiving their confessions), right through to the people working in the funeral home preparing the body of Anton for his funeral. This approach allows Galgut to delve into the inner lives of the characters at a level where all of them, even passing characters, have a level of human depth and complexity that the amount written about them wouldn’t normally allow.

And it’s also worth saying that the strength of the book is in the treatment of racism and, more specifically, the corrupting effect of living for decades in a society divided by racial hatred and inequality. There’s a fear that pervades the Swarts family’s actions throughout– of the end of apartheid, of the decline of white power, of a sense that their farm is an island of safety in an otherwise hostile land. It’s not always spoken (though sometimes it is) but is often clear through the inner life of the characters that Galgut brings to the surface.

And for the black characters in the novel, most notably Salome and her son Lukas – they are marked to the core, scarred, by their lives in apartheid South Africa. Salome is physically frail, tired and old after working for the family for decades, doing the jobs they didn’t want to, living in a rickety house that wasn’t even hers. And her son is full if resentment for the life he and his family have ended up living, having ended up struggling with alcohol and spending time in prison as a consequence of struggling with the constant unfairness of a racist society.

Only Amor manages to avoid being consumed by the fear and longing for the past that animated her family, and she does so by renouncing all of it – her family ties, her inheritance, her life on the farm, all of it. She ends up living far away, working as a nurse for HIV patients, with nothing to her name. It’s her way of saying she wants no part of it, not her family and not South Africa’s racist past.

Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Neomi is a well-off society girl from Mexico City asked by her father to go rescue her cousin Catalina from an apparently bad marriage to the handsome Virgil Doyle, who she lives with in a crumbling mansion in the Mexican countryside, along with the rest of the Doyle family.

Catalina had written, talking of ghosts in the walls, and as Neomi quickly discovers, something is wrong in the house. Daily affairs are overseen by the matron-like Florence, Virgil’s sister; the brother, Francis, appears to ge entirely controlled; Catalina herself appears to be being kept in a near-catatonic state; and everyone in in thrall to the ancient Howard, whose body is so old it is puss-ridden, putrified and appears to be decomposing.

The independent, fiery and smart Neomi investigates, gradually bringing the fearful Franicis on side. And she discovers a lot, though its not always clear, at least not until the end.

[Spoiler alert!] Ultimately the Doyle family discovered centuries ago a supernatural force, a fungus, that emanates supernatural power. They have ingested it for years, ultimately giving Howard a prolonged life and chosen family members – always male, of course – power. They have retained the power for themselves through incest, and murder, but were using Catalina as new vehicle for reproducing, and plan to use Neomi the same way.

The strength of this nicely written and constructed story is the way these secrets unfold; you know there’s something deeply wrong, but it’s a complex secret and the reader learns about it as Neomi does.

It’s also an intriguing take on the patriarchy – how it’s the men who most benefit from the supernatural power, Florence helps maintain this, and its the continuous under-estimation of Neomi as a vain, entitled society girl that allows her to succeed in the end.

Catalina herself is much more typically helpless; she’s always been obsessed with fairytales, and the romance of being whisked away to a countryside mansion by Virgil appeals, until of course it is inverted and the horrific reality is revealed.

Two things really stood out in this novel. One was the way Moreno-Garcia plays with some typical horror tropes – the folk horror-like way in which Neomi leaves the city and experiences the unsettling nature of rural life;  the vampire-lore idea of a house built on soil imported from the home country (from England to Mexico); and the classic haunted house, which runs through all this.

The other thing – and the thing that really elavates this book – is that the supernatural power that drives Howard and his family is a fungus that appears to have a kind of creeping, malevolent consciousness. What it wants isn’t clear – if it even wants anything; it is non-human, and for precisely that reason its motives are unknown and unknowable. I’ve blogged on this previously here – https://gilesbooks.wordpress.com/2020/08/12/literature-of-the-non-human/.

There is more interest in nature or natural phenoma as things-in-themselves, as science discovers their complexity, their drives, possibly even forms of consciousness (think panspychism), but also their omplete otherness. What’s so intriguing is the attempt to write about the non-human, to feature it in a story, and the impossibility of ever representing it or portraying it.

Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange – Susanna Clarke

Wow, wow, wow – this is a novel to be in awe of. A thousand pages of incredibly written literary fantasy that keeps you gripped page after page.

It’s an impossible task to summarise the plot! A few things though. It’s set in the nineteenth century. Mr Norrell is an arrogant fuddy-duddy who believes he is the only person who can perform magic properly, and after a successful conjurring in York Minster goes to London and gets the ear of government.

Jonathan Strange is a young upstart who discovers an ability to do magic, becomes Norell’s apprentice but eventually moves on, his arrogance and desire to practice magic at his own pace getting the better of him.

Through the story the pair practice magic of many kinds, often with effects unknown to them. In particular, their magical activities break the barrier between the human and the fairy world, in which a  fairy with ‘thistle-down hair’ keeps people enthralled and controlled.

A woman – central to the story – who Norrell brought back from the dead (Lady Pole), Strange’s wife (Arabella) and Lady Pole’s servant (Stephen) all find themselves trapped each evening in this fairy world, but unable to break out or even speak of it during the day, such is the magic of the fairy.

Broken by the eventual death of his wife, Jonathan Strange reaches a point where he conjures up a darkness, a massive column in the centre of Venice, and eventually Strange and Norrell confront the fairy’s magic.

There’s so much more plot to this book – so many nuances and lines of fancy – but this is the heart of the story.

So what to say? A few things.

First, the style: incredible. Think of Charles Dickens if he were writing today in a way that mocks himself. Susanna Clarke write like a knowing Dickens, laughing at the characters and their ridiculous ways of behaving. But at the same time the book is full of footnotes and references, all fictional, to give the sense that this is a historically accurate record.

Then there’s the themes. There are some social themes. In particular, the main characters are men, with the women having only a secondary role, and you can’t help but assume that’s done intentionally, to reflect the ridiculous sexism of the time in which the book’s based.

And there’s a class schism. Many of the main characters are upper class, as you’d expect of that time. But it’s the servants and assistants who guide what they do and often provide the most interest – Stephen, a black servant to the Poles who has more about him than anyone, if only he weren’t trapped in the other world; and Childermass, Norrell’s servant who like Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, is the political brains behind his boss’s – and his own – success.

And there’s a beautiful battle between the old and the new. Norrell is a stuffy traditionalist who wants to keep things as they are, to maintain his own status. Strange is an innovator, wanting to experiment and try out new magical practice. But actually, in the end, both are are as bad as each other, creating forces they know nothing of, an other-worldly magical force that imprisons many and threatens to take over the human world.

And that’s maybe the great theme of this book: When you dabble in magic you can’t expect there to be no consequences. It’s an ungovernable power and you need to expect something in return. In this case the fairy with the thistle-down hair trapping people in his world and moving to destroy or at least invade the existing one. If you play with fire, expect to get burned.

The Lookout – Mariana Enriquez

This disarmingly simple story packs a complicated punch.

Elina is a heartbroken women staying at a beachside hotel for her 31st birthday to get some space. Already troubled after being attacked and raped in her teens, recent abandonment by her partner Pablo has resulted in therapy, institutions and prescription drugs. All ineffective it seems.

The hotel, it turns out, has a Lady Upstairs – a ghost or creature that lives in a locked up tower, that can shape-shift and reveal itself when needed. That’s not why Elina is there, but may have drawn other guests.

The Lady Upstairs spots Elina – with her inner trauma – and sees an opportunity to entice Elina into the tower before swapping positions and freeing herself.

We don’t know what happens in the end, though Elina – so hopelessly lost – is surely unlikely to see or resist the Lady’s trap?

It’s a common kind of plot, but there’s a lot in this short story. Great writing of course, and a sense of pity for Elina that Enriquez conjures up so quickly and easily.

But there’s also the tropes or references from folklore and horror – a woman in a fairytale tower, the Lookout, above the hotel, apparently trapped and desparate. A dead woman just waiting for someone so broken they can trick them into taking her place. And there’s the ocean – often seen as a place to refresh and renew, but also a place of the unknown and alien, the inhuman.

What is perhaps strongest in this story is the presence of trauma and the supernatural. Often in stories, a strange or unexplained phenomenon turns out to be a manifestation of someone’s inner trauma and can be explained away. But here there is both – the Lady Upstairs is a supernatural being that preys on women traumatised by lfe.