Dark Hollow by
John Connolly
hbk out January 00
Published by Hodder Stoughton
at £10
Looking to exorcise his ghosts and lay down the burden of his past, Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, the ex-cop turned private eye of last year’s best-selling Every Dead Thing has returned to Maine, the home of his parents, and grandparents before them.
“But the past is not so easily denied ” Parker/Connolly writes. “Things left unfinished, things left unsaid, they all, in the end, come back to haunt us”.
There are quite a few things left unfinished in Dark Hollow: a gangland shoot-out involving the FBI, an old woman who commits suicide rather than return to the old folk’s home that is her final resting place. Later we hear of the disappearance of several young women many years before. But first there is the matter of local bad boy Billy Purdue, once an orphan child, and now the chief suspect in the killing of his own wife and son.
The incident cannot help but remind Bird of his own loss, and he stumbles out into the darkness once again in search of the truth. So far so good; spellbinding prose, expert characterisation, quirky humour with the arrival of gay hitmen Angel and Louis, and beautifully drawn emotional complications as Parker kicks over the embers of an affair with the wife of a local lawman many years before. But the Great North Woods of Maine (Stephen King inspired?) are dark, as Chandler once had it about the LA streets, with something more than night: “something that had been lost had now been found again...And it devoured the stars as it went.”
This Gothic tinge, to my mind at least, sits uneasily with the other more realistic strands of the narrative. There is overload too in the character of the psychotic gunman known as Stritch and perhaps in the sub-plot concerning the disappearance of yet another young woman, distractingly the errant daughter of Walter Cole, the moral arbiter from the first half of Every Dead Thing. Nevertheless, this is a less broken-backed narrative than Thing, written throughout with that lyrical intensity Connolly shares with James Lee Burke, its many strands masterfully brought together in the apocalyptic climax “where the wilderness truly began”, in Dark Hollow itself. It’s a fascinating mix, often moving and damned entertaining–but it is some distance from the more quietly effective Ross Macdonald books that were Connolly’s original inspiration.
Dark Hollow by
John Connolly