The Fallen Children, by David Owen

The Fallen Children is an updated retelling of John Wyndham's The Midwitch Cuckoos, a book I read about 7 years ago and absolutely adored. I definitely think this leans more towards John Carpenter's enjoyably bonkers Village of the Damned than Midwich Cuckoos though, inspiration wise- only a selection of women are found to be inexplicably pregnant rather than all, and there is a great plot emphasis on the missing child- aborted in TFC, dead at birth in VotD which I do not recall even featuring in Wyndham's original (though there is a gender imbalance of 30 girls and 31 boys). It's a really successful transplantation of the story into the 21st century and focuses thematically on the idea of the mob mentality and their angry, auto-hostile judgement, the fear of the 'different' and the difficulties faced by young people in defying expectations, clawing at the slippery scraps of social mobility and the crippling lack of options to those born into poverty.

One evening, the residents and everyone in the immediate vicinity of Midwich Tower black out. It's at night, so many people miss the odd event entirely. However, in the days that follow, our narrators realise that they are all inexplicably pregnant, and that their babies are developing at a supernaturally fast rate. The four young women become the targets of hate crime and violence as they try to discover what happened that night, how come they can read each other's thoughts and feel the others' emotions and how the hell are they going to be able to look after babies. The book was really effective at creating an atmosphere of menace and hostility as it becomes more apparent that the characters are pretty much under siege by their neighbours. It showed how quickly people can turn on those they perceive to be different or dangerous.

Interestingly, The Fallen Children focuses on the lives, emotions and reactions of the young women that find themselves pregnant, something that until now nobody has explored in any great detail. Here, they are 17 (ish) year old Keisha, a former bad girl that's turned her life around, studies hard and has set her sights on university as a route out of the poverty of the Midwich Towerblock. She is furious and disgusted at the violation of her body and mortified that after all her efforts to make something of herself, she is just another estate girl with a baby. Her former friend Siobhan, directionless and damaged also finds herself in a similar situation. She is furious about the hijacking of her body and is most vocal about doing something about it (note: I felt I was supposed to be disgusted by Siobhan being overweight as it was referenced frequently and commented on by more than one character- that just didn't really feel right to me...I think that made me like her more because people were being so horrible to her). Third victim is timid 14yo Maida, a Muslim girl trapped into a future she doesn't want who sees this baby as an opportunity to change her course, and a nurse in her 20s, Olivia, who had previously known herself to be barren and so is overjoyed at the idea of being a mother by any means necessary. I don't recall any sections from Olivia's POV...The last narrator is Morris, ex-boyfriend of Keisha, in trouble with the local thugs, under financial pressure from his family and debtors and, incidentally, not pregnant.

Written in alternating perspectives, I honestly quite struggled to distinguish the voices of the narrators as the POV switched between them- perhaps it's because dialogue continued through some conversations despite the POV switch? I've never really had this problem before with multiple narrators. It would've flowed better for me if the characters' Voices were a little more distinct, if they exhibited more of their personality through the way they spoke and thought- they were just a little bit too similar to keep them all separate and distinct in my head.

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and felt it kept up a good pace, kept that oppressive atmosphere of fear and hostility, kept that ticking tome bomb of the imminent baby and the race to find out the truth about the Night Out...however, I did feel that after the babies arrived, it lost its momentum somewhat and became a bit more confused with its messages. I really did not like the attitudes of Keisha and Maida regarding Siobhan's successful attempt to end her pregnancy. Like, even if it's a mysterious alien baby that you've no idea where it came from, hearing characters direct hatred, judgement and pain at a person for terminating a pregnancy (ever a supernatural one) leaves a bit of a nasty taste. I get that the super-powerful-babies were physically preventing their carriers from directly inflicting harm on them (that was really well done throughout the narrative- it really feels like the girls are absolutely at the mercy of the fetus inside them) like when Siobhan tried and fails to step off the roof, and when the fetus erase the word "abortion" from their mothers' minds- that read like an unnatural manual override from a parasite within...but to hear some of the post baby bile directed at Siobhan by her former friends just didn't sit right and just didn't feel like it was part of the same book. Like, the baby is out of you now, act like a human. Once the babies are born, we drop Siobhan as a narrator and pick up Maida instead, who suddenly comes across as Children Evangelical and is all for unleashing them on the world.

I really liked how the latter part of the book the shifts the focus onto the idea of belonging, it rescues the third act. Zero, the sole male Child, feels adrift and angry because his twin did not survive- there's an interesting question about nature and nurture lurking under that storyline that asks to what extent we are in control of our own behaviour and destiny. Similarly excluded and lost, Maida feels like she has created something extraordinary but cannot truly be a part of it- Marvel and Helena, the Female Children, share a bond that she cannot ever hope to experience.  During these later section of the book, the characters are beginning to make sense of the similarities and joining the dots between the Midwich occurrence and a similar one in Cornwall, a nice little nod to the (possibly Cornish) fictional village of the source story. There is a lot of delicious mystery left unsolved because sometimes things cannot be explained.

So all in all, it's mostly really good and is definitely an interesting and engaging modernisation- I would definitely recommend The Fallen Children as a fast paced kind-of-mystery about teens placed in impossible situations and having to battle against their whole neighbourhood just to live their lives- I loved the setting and the updating of classic sci-fi, thought the themes of prejudice, difference and that lack of autonomy, either socially or bodily were explored well. I liked the evolution of the story into a story of belonging and being in control of your own direction, but I felt that it fell down by its characters a little. I just couldn't fathom their behaviour- towards Siobhan after the births, Maida's super-villain story arc, how Morris just seemed constantly in denial and hopelessly useless. Maybe that's just totally acceptable teen logic, I dunno.

Pet Semetary, by Stephen King

Why yes. Yes I do intend to read them all eventually.

This is the almost last of the SK books I own with the blood red spine of "Iconic Terror". Famously King cites this as his most horrific book. Not the scariest, or the goriest, but the meanest, darkest of his work, the one he tried to bury in a drawer because it was too horrible.

Inspired by his own move to a Maine University, to a new house in a new town, one near a road frequented by big trucks on which his daughter's cat Smucky got killed, it's a story of what could have happened.

Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, takes a new job as director of the University of Maine's campus medical service. Looking to get away from the in-laws he hates and because the job is a nice cushy number of fixing up booze-injured students and fresher's flu, he moves to Ludlow, Maine. Uprooting his wife Rachel, young kids Gage and Ellie, and Ellie's cat Winston Churchill (Church to his friends) from the Midwest is tough at first, but the family settle in quickly with the help of wholesome Yankee father figure Jud Crandall, lifetime Ludlow resident and keeper of secrets. Lou comes to see him as a father figure, and he and his arthritic wife Norma are soon fast friends with the Creeds.

It's Jud that initially warns his new neighbours of the dangers of the highway that divides their houses, claiming that "that road has used up a lot of animals". It's Jud too that takes them to visit the Pet Semetary, a little plot of land tended by generations of Ludlow kids, all of whom laid to rest their beloved pets that the road "used up". Jud is nothing if not an enabler. The night after the family's first visit to the semetary, 5 year old Ellie has a prophetic-feeling dream about Church dying on the highway. Lou sees this emotional outburst as a healthy, normal response to a child's first encounter with mortality- his wife Rachel, who lost a sister young to spinal meningitis has a total death phobia and will not entertain the concept of anyone, least of all Church, dying. This pretty much sets up the inevitable chain of events that follow. There are deaths. There are resurrections. There are ancient Indian burial grounds and spirits of the north and all kinds of ancient malice.

It's not an elaborately plotted novel. To the untrained eye it might look like not a lot happens in Pet Semetary, but it's expertly paced with an oppressive, low simmering malevolence that lurks just behind every line. We follow Louis to work and back. The beers he drinks with Jud. We watch him scoop up his daughter's dead cat, and watch him follow Jud to the secret local-pet-semetary-for-local-people graveyard out in the creepiest woods in literature. We know it's a terrible idea, even before the cat turns up alive- changed, but alive.

I really liked Louis as a character, the Stephen King stand-in for this particular story. His mediocrity is kind of endearing, and he seemed to play the role of "family man" quite convincingly. Mostly enamored with his lovely family, occasionally frustrated and annoyed. Cocks up infrequently, but enough to prove he's a real person. He's a fairly weak character, in denial of his weakness. He blames his shortcomings on anything and anyone he can, he makes excuses. Is he guided and manipulated my some malevolent force? Or does he just make really bad calls?

I loved how subtle this book is, and how pure the horror of its plot. There are no scares, no prolonged scenes of torment or torture, no murders or stalkings- there isn't even a bad guy. It's a type of horror that makes you wonder whether your own morals and beliefs would have stood up to the same test, a creeping, chilling horror at things that seem 95% ridiculous. Pet Semetary is about wanting something so desperately that you do not care about consequences. The refusal to acknowledge that sometimes the hardest thing to do is the right thing, in this case to let go, to grieve, to pick up the pieces and carry on. I guess too it's about how you can never un-learn something, and the deadly temptation that this might sometimes present.

With every additional Stephen King book I read, the more I get why he's sold 350 million books. Man's no amateur.

The Girls, by Emma Cline

What a stunner. A shocking, commanding novel that transports the reader to the tail end of the 60s, to a dusty, sun bleached and grubby California. The same summer, in fact, of the moon landings and Woodstock, though such historical events seem quite removed from the reclusive society of the ranch. It's strange that a novel set 40 years ago feels so un-historical in tone- it feels to immediate, too contemporary to be set so long ago.

The book's narrator Evie, is technically recounting her story from the relatively safe anonymity of middle age, though the book is set predominantly in the shimmering heat-haze of 1969. The summer that Evie was 14, mournfully waiting to be sent to boarding school by her divorcing parents in an attempt to repair her generic teenage problems. Evie submerges the reader in her listless adolescence. Her boredom, her frustration at her vaguely hippy mother, constantly trying out men as prospective next husbands, her inability to connect and her lack of belonging stand out starkly from the page. She is lost and she doesn't care who finds her, if anybody ever bothers.

Evie embarks on quite the journey as a character. She starts off as something straight out of a Judy Blume novel; stretched between naive childhood and uncharted adulthood, already painfully aware of the double standards set by gender roles. Already assessing herself and her body with the critical male eye. She is so hung up on the idea of love, so terrified that she might never deserve it. She is needy, lonely, growing apart from her best friend Connie with whom she practises the rituals of adulthood; they listen to lame records, read trashy magazines and try on clothes together. Evie flirts inexpertly with Connie's older brother- knowing that she doesn't really like him, cataloguing his flaws, but desperate to be noticed, to be validated by male attention. She is passive and prone to drifting, the sort of character that things happen to, rather than that makes things happen. By the end of the novel, she's a sun-browned, skinny 'Girl' narrowly missing out on being a part of one of the most shockingly inexplicable murders of the decade. More by accident of circumstances than by and abundance of moral fibre.

The Girls is a fictionalisation of the Manson Family, of Charles Manson and the raggedy cult of women that orbited him. Here, the charismatic, egomaniac Russell stands in for Manson, though he loiters at the edges of the story, talked about more often than seen. Cline focuses instead on The Girls, his hippie harem, his acolytes. Front and centre is the dark-haired Suzanne; a hypnotic beauty that first ensnares Evie's attention; it's Evie's desire to be close to Suzanne that leads to her joining Russell's community. Evie's love for Suzanne, her thirst for her approval form much of the novel's plot- Evie's gaze is never far from her. The ranch, the Girls; they provide a new world to Evie, one that she can be a part of, one she is accepted by. She can shed her adolescence here, surrounded by the amorphous flock, promised love.

It's more about how hard it is to be a girl, generally, than being a very specific girl in a specific time and place. It's about the gruesome struggle of female adolescence, more than the violence that the Russel/Manson family would eventually go on to commit. It's a testament to Cline's masterful prose that a book with a relatively sparse plot (when you actually think about it) and with such horrific, mindless violence can feel like an illuminating and beautiful experience. I was totally absorbed in the world of this book, in the grubby intrigue of the ranch and its girls. It's not difficult to understand their desire for a more meaningful life, a freedom from responsibility and domestic routine. It's that identification, that alliance with people that are essentially criminally psychotic that is so unsettling. Even in a fictional version, 40 years after the fact- the cult, Evie's circumstances; it all seems so easy to fall into.

A compelling novel, written in some of the most striking, most beautiful prose I've had the pleasure of  reading in a long time. Themes of adolescence and rebellion, of belonging and sisterhood are all folded into her prose. Cults and their enigmatic, delusional leaders are ceaselessly fascinating, and Cline transplants a fiction onto a well known story brilliantly. Suzanne and Russell felt so real- perhaps because, really, the are. This book is going to be huge.

The Gun, by Bali Rai

A tense and fast paced little book from Barrington Stoke about the terrible consequences of making bad decisions. Some quickly but well developed characters from diverse backgrounds too, including a refugee family.

Opening with the narrator, Jonas, being questioned in a police interview room, the reader knows from the beginning that this story is not going to have a happy ending. He recounts his story to the police officers and solicitors around the table.

Jonas has been best mates with Kamal and Binny his whole life- they've grown up together on the same high rise estate. When they witness a shoot-and-run one day outside the chicken shop, Jonas peels off from the group and investigates an alleyway. Finding the discarded murder weapon, he pockets it and takes it home, not considering the chain of events that will follow this decision.

Jonas keeps quiet for a few days hiding the gun from his mother and younger sister, wondering whether he should turn in the gun or not. But some gang trouble with a rival group leads him to show the weapon to his two friends. Always appearing on the brink of madness, Kamal seems to change when he knows about, and handles the gun. Soon he's out of control; armed robberies, intimidation, muggings. Jonas and Binny become increasingly concerned for their lives, the lives of their families and for the safety and mental state of Kamal.

Needless to say, things get out of control and end tragically, landing Jonas in his police interview. The book is breathlessly paced and really sharp. The sentences are short not only to appeal to non-readers, but also because Jonas is in a life or death situation and has to think, speak and act quickly. He's a good storyteller, and the reader sympathises with him because he lives in poverty and in fear and has become caught up in gang fights and turf wars because it seems that that's just what happens to boys in that area. Friendship equals gangs, and all the obsession with respect, status and territory that comes with it.

The novel is gritty and relatable- it's not exactly The Wire, but you really get a sense of the inevitability of violence and gangs for these boys. It's an easy to read, engaging story with an important message about consequences and escalating problems. There's also an important social message there about the communities stuck on the fringes of society in cycles of poverty, violence and bad decisions who just fall through the net and are ignored by the authorities.

The Mountain Can Wait, by Sarah Leipciger

Tom Berry is a stoic and dependable man- a man that can kill an adult buck and butcher it in the field and fix pretty much anything without even having to think about it. He's a mountain man through and through and lives immersed and in awe of nature. Tom spends half of his year running a small planting outfit in the remote Canadian logging forests, a rag-tag bunch of gap year types, oddballs and drifters. The other half he spends with his his family- a fairly low maintenance daughter, Erin in her early teens and Curtis, a misfit on the brink of adulthood with a few bad habits and a self destructive streak. The reader gets the impression (as do his kids) that domestic Tom is a badly fitting disguise, compared to the more comfortable loner wilderness man. Raising them as a single father Tom has always done his best. He's proud of their quiet independence and fortitude, qualities that he has imparted on them. He's ever watchful for signs of darkness and depression in his daughter, for the illnesses which drove his wife to her desertion and ultimately to her death.

A good and wholesome man, Tom channels the quiet, fatherly patience of Atticus Finch for the early part of the book. He lets his children make mistakes (and makes them himself), comfortable in the knowledge that they will learn from them. Until the incident where it's an irreversible, life-destroying mistake that can never be undone. The plot begins with a fatal accident, a hit and run on a dark mountainside. When he learns of this accident (news is slow and sparse in the wilderness) Tom must leave his forestry outfit early and seek out his missing son. As he does so, the backstory of his family is filled in- the struggles and hardships that he's endured for the sake of his family, the difficulties of single fatherhood. A family he never really wanted, but cannot imagine life without now- he loves them fiercely, despite the emotional distance he maintains. The effects of the accident have effects for both Tom and Curtis, raking up some buried ghosts of the past and unexpectedly helping both men to understand each other better. Long-held grudges and misplaced bitterness are brought out into the light and addressed at last.

I loved the sense of place that was so beautifully and so thoroughly painted in this novel. Leipciger's prose is so sensory and evocative, it really is quite stunning. Her style of writing is quite unusual- breathlessly intense in places and gentle and subtle in others. The reader feels almost telepathic, picking up forest smells and sounds that can't possibly be in the text. The mind-bendingly immense wilderness of Canada is almost unimaginable to someone from the UK. This distance between outposts of civilisation, the isolation and just the sheer amount of nothing just doesn't compute. 

The Mountain Can Wait is a small and self contained novel about family duty, very personal conflicts and the delicate and inexplicable dynamics of complicated families. It's not a fast paced book, but it's gripping and it takes its time to build and define its characters.  Their personalities, pain and confusion pour out of the pages in a way that is captivating and immersive.Though it has a small cast, it is a vivid and detailed one, full of confusion, love and choices. The personalities are strong, whole and relatable and the reader feels truly invested in the lives of the Berries. Despite its modest plot, the climax is both emotional and inevitable, we see it coming, but there is nothing that can be done to change it.

It's a beautifully crafted novel that really takes the time to shape and study its characters, examining every choice that they have made to find themselves at their present hardship. It's an intimate story that fills the reader's senses with woodland scents and light, and conveys the trauma and struggles of its characters in beautiful and heartbreaking detail. Definitely an author to keep an eye on.

Thanks to Tinder Press and Headline for the review copy.