I’ve
recently read another awesome piece of dark fiction, THE DEMONOLOGIST by Andrew
Pyper, which I’d like to bring to everyone’s attention, but you’ll find my full
review of it at the lower end of this column. Scroll down now if you so wish,
though if you fancy a more leisurely stroll first, here’s a quick rundown on my
last couple of days, which comprised a pretty remarkable journey from bookshop to bookshop across what seemed like the whole of the England's wild north. This is not the kind of
thing that happens regularly in the life of an author, but it’s certainly an
experience to remember when it does …
The Great White North was the Great Green, Cork-Brown
and Generally Misty North these last two days of mid-March, as I travelled uphill and
down dale, ploughing back and forth between North Yorkshire, Northumbria and
Cumbria in a pre-arranged quest to meet those many gallant folk who fight the good fight in
the cause of that institution so beloved by so many of us, and yet probably
widely underappreciated too: the small, independent bookshop.
The whole delightful thing was arranged for me by those kind folk
at HarperCollins, who not only pre-booked the meets-and-greets, but even
provided a driver for one lengthy stretch of the trip – thanks for that, Mike
(did those bleak moorland roads get a bit dicey, or what?) – though I think I
must have spent 12 hours at the wheel myself over the last couple of days. I
was a bit stiff when I finally got home yesterday night.
The whole charabanc kicked off with a cracking event at
the White Rose Book Café in Thirsk, where, in company with successful children’s
author, Rob Biddulph, I met a load of local booksellers, all hugely knowledgeable and
enthusiastic folk who are seriously dedicated to their trade. I was treated
to a lip-smacking three-course dinner at The Black Lion (which I washed down
with copious beers), made an impromptu speech – which seemed to go down okay –
and then was allocated a very cosy room upstairs in a delightfully olde worlde hotel, The Golden Fleece.
The following day, we really hit the road, traversing
the wildest, most windswept realms of England’s far north, skirting mountain,
fell and forest, at times barely seeing another human being, but always
receiving warm welcomes in those quaint little bookshops on our itinerary. In
fact, at the Kendal branch of Waterstones, a customer I’d just signed a copy
of HUNTED for collapsed on the spot and had an immediate epileptic fit. That’s
no lie, though I don’t think it was due to the excitement of meeting me (even though
she afterwards, jokily, said that it was). She recovered quickly and safely, so there was nothing to worry about.
Overall, it was an amazing couple of days. Huge thanks
go to everyone who attended these events and made me feel so welcome. Off the
top of my head – and I really hope I’ve not missed anyone out (please remind me
if I have)! – here are some of the folk I encountered who were such good
company and so interested in stocking and promoting my novels: Bookends
(Carlisle and Keswick), Waterstones (Carlisle and Kendal), White Rose Books
(Thirsk), Forum Books (Corbridge), the Little Ripon Bookshop (Ripon), Drake
Bookshop (Stockton), the Grove Bookshop (Ilkley), Bertram Books
(wholesalers), and the Booksellers Association. Thanks also to the guys at
Harper who facilitated the experience: Mike, Olivia, Ben, Mick, Harriet, and
Helen and Helena back in the office (as before, I sincerely hope I’ve not missed
anyone out – please feel free to correct me, if I have).
*
For those further interested in this type of thing, here
is a blog I penned at the beginning of the month for the HarperCollins INDIE THINKING website,
on the subject of small independent booksellers (in this case with a slight bias
towards second-hand bookshops) and my lifelong love-affair with them …
I owe my late father a great deal, not least my love
of books – which he infected me with at a very early age, but also a love of
bookshops. I suppose people would expect a writer to say something like that,
but for me it’s actually a very personal thing, and not just for reasons of
nostalgia, though that comes into it too.
To start with, let’s tear ourselves away for a second
from this current age, wherein so many of us lead such rapid-fire lives that we
don’t have time to browse for books any more, but purchase our reading material
online or pop distractedly into our high street chain-stores, where all the new
best-sellers are arrayed in front of us on a display stand so that we can
quickly grab one and be on our way again.
It became part and parcel of those dreamy holidays,
our regular visits to the many bookshops we discovered, which almost without
fail were small and discreet, tucked away in cathedral mews or down the ends of
harbour-side alleys. Just talking about atmospheric shops like that brings back
a rush of fond memories: the clangour of the door-bell when you entered; the
combined smells of dust, pipe-smoke and sun-warmed leather binding; the
respectful murmur of polite enquiries at the counter; the rustle of
age-yellowed pages from the browser alongside you …
That is something a great many of us have lost in
these days of e-readers and orders-by-iPhone: the sheer joy of working your way
along the shelves, searching through innumerable titles of a type you would
rarely encounter during one of your quick-fire visits to the city centre. And
it wasn’t just aesthetically pleasing; it actually paid dividends!
My personal preference is for dark and scary fiction,
everything from thriller novels to collections of ghost stories. I’m a lifelong
collector too; it’s been my quest of decades to create an immense library of
the mysterious, the brooding and the macabre. And how often on these trips this
tenacity and perseverance was rewarded – and not just in days long past.
One particularly joyous occasions in the 1990s, by
which time I was grown up and had my own family, we were heading north when we
happened to call in at Cartmel, a Cumbrian village famous mainly for its
racecourse but also for its medieval church and its dramatic encircling fells,
and on days when the race-meet is not in town, for its rapid return to the
status of sleepy hamlet, when only the occasional clatter of hiking boots or
lazy yapping of a dog will disturb the peace. Here, after lunching in a local
pub, I followed a chalkboard sign which simply read BOOKSELLER, passed under an
ivy-covered arch and at the end of a narrow passage, discovered a tiny shop
with mullioned windows and an open door.
Tiny on the outside maybe, though indoors it was a
virtual Tardis, seeming to physically expand as I wandered from one shelf-lined
room to the next, each one crammed with books, which for once were ranked in
completely comprehensible order. I found the Horror/Thriller section without
difficulty, and there was blown away by the treasures on offer: Not just
classics of the genre, but rarities and collectables too: authors whose work
had long been discontinued by their publishers, titles that were deleted
decades ago – and so many of them high on my ‘want-want-want’ list.
What a haul that was. The first day of my holiday and
I’d provided myself with a month’s worth of quality reading, and purely because
I followed in the family tradition of refusing to pass the local independent
bookshop without checking inside.
Sadly, that smashing little place, whose name,
somewhat criminally, I have forgotten, has long ceased to trade (what a sadness
it was the first day I called back there, to find it empty). But it can’t be a
surprise that even today I get no end of pleasure from the same pastime:
invading every little side-street bookshop I see in every new town I visit.
So what can we learn from this? Well, it’s pretty
simple. Support your local booksellers. Unfortunately, they’re a tad like sunny
spells – there’s never any guarantee they’re here to stay. So get through that
door and ring that bell at every opportunity.
It’s not like it’ll be chore.
*
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS ...
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction
(crime, thriller, horror and fantasy) – both old and new – that I have recently
read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will
certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by
the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books
in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed
… so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of
work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not
be your thing.
THE DEMONOLOGIST by Andrew
Pyper (2013)
Nothing is
going right in the life of Professor David Ullman. He’s an expert in demonic
literature, in particular Milton’s Paradise
Lost, but he’s also an atheist, so he gets no spiritual fulfilment from
this. In addition, his home life is a mess, his marriage falling apart and his
12-year-old daughter, Tess, suffering from depression. Then he learns that his
best friend, Elaine O’Brien, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
In an effort
to get away from it all, Ullman accepts a curious invitation to travel to
Venice and bring his expertise to bear on “a phenomenon”. Taking Tess with him,
he embarks on what he hopes will be a short but welcome holiday. However, the
phenomenon turns out to be the apparent and rather horrible possession of an
unknown man in a dingy backstreet house. Bewildered and distressed, Ullman
returns to his hotel, only to find Tess in a similar condition, standing on the
roof. Before he can intervene, she throws herself into the Grand Canal,
screaming two words: “Find me!”
When the
police search, no body is recovered. But Ullman saw the incident with his own
eyes, and is certain his daughter is dead. He returns to the States,
devastated, but soon embarks on a mission to learn more about the evil spirit
he confronted in that grubby old house.
So begins a
journey from religious denial to religious conviction for David Ullman. And
it’s a very arduous journey indeed, a demonic entity that he’s only previously
encountered in fictional work leading him from pillar to post across North America
with a series of complex clues. It’s also a journey he must make with an
extremely dangerous man on his heels, a proficient killer who calls himself
‘George Barone’ after a famous Mafia hitman. Whoever this guy really is and
whoever’s paid him to pursue Ullman are details that remain elusive for the
time-being. All that matters initially is Ullman surviving and unravelling the
devilish puzzle that has been laid in front of him in the seemingly vain hope
that, at the end of it all, he might find Tess, and that she might – just might! – still be alive …
In some ways,
The Demonologist is more like a road
trip than a horror novel, but be under no illusions. For all its arthouse
trappings, it is a horror novel, and
in some ways a very traditional one. It’s not even low on gore – there are
killings aplenty, while the demon, when it appears, will be very familiar in
its motives and manners to those imagined by orthodox religious folk.
And
ultimately, at least at subtext level, that’s what this is all about: a soul’s
voyage from darkness to light. It’s been suggested that in some ways it mirrors
Satan’s journey in Paradise Lost; he
too clawed his agonising way out of the pit, though in his case there was no
chance of redemption at the end.
David Ullman
is a strange kind of hero – somewhat stiff, somewhat stuffy, quite superior on
some occasions, and yet vulnerable and uncertain in others (he’s been dealt a
pretty crappy hand, after all!), and for much of the time in this book, he’s
terrified, relying on intellect rather than raw courage. For all that, he’s a
nice guy in his odd, introspective way. So you can’t help but root for him
along every inch of his difficult path.
I personally
wasn’t terrified by The Demonologist,
even though I first noticed it in various ‘top 10 scariest novels’ lists. But I
was intrigued and pleasantly unnerved (the hitman is in many ways your very
worst nightmare – an utterly cold, completely unemotional professional
murderer), and once I got into it, I found it a damn good read. It’s taut,
tense, and while it might not keep you awake at night, it will certainly keep
you turning the pages.
As usual, just for fun, here are my picks for who
should play the leads if The
Demonologist someday makes it to the screen (I’ve heard that a movie
version is in development, but we’ll have to wait and see):
Professor David Ullman – Brian Cranston
Elaine O’Brien – Mayim Bialik
George Barone – Viggo Mortensen
*
At the risk of making myself look less heroic and melodramatic, that pic at the top of this column is sadly not a shot of my good self striking a 'lord of all I survey' pose on the edge of a typically dark and silent northern lake, but Heck from the cover of HUNTED. For those interested, that image was originally going to be part of the cover for DEAD MAN WALKING the fourth Heck novel, the one actually set in the Lake District ... but for some reason it was pushed back to the fifth and most recent in the series.
The Bookends picture is by Kenneth Allen, the Little Ripon shot used by courtesy of the Little Ripon Bookshop.
The Bookends picture is by Kenneth Allen, the Little Ripon shot used by courtesy of the Little Ripon Bookshop.
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