Every Dead Thing by
John Connolly
hbk out January 99
Published by Hodder Stoughton
at £10
Ex-New York cop and occasional PI Charlie Parker, guilt-ridden and sober after the ritual killing of his wife and daughter whilst he was out drinking, gets a tip from a colleague. An old psychic woman from the Louisiana bayou knows of a similar killing and speaks of someone called The Travelling Man. But first Parker takes on the case of a missing girl, one that will involve him with some particularly nasty Mob gunmen and a series of child murders thirty years before. Something more then than a simple serial killer novel.
Free-lance Irish journalist Connolly's first book, sprawling but
ambitious, is set to be the most-hyped book of early 1999. Auctioned for £350,000, the highest-ever two-book deal with an Irish author, this
review is likely to be just one in the blanket review coverage
promised on the cover of my proof copy. Most of those reviews will, I
guess, be favourable. This is a big, meaty, often superbly written
novel, astonishing, for a first-time author, in its scope and apparent
veracity. Most readers, including this one, will have found it hard to
put down. One or two will never pick it up, of course, for this is a
book of sudden, horrifying violence and no-holds-barred explicit
scene-of-the-crime detail.
Almost justifiably so, for Connolly wishes us to confront the idea of
evil. Not the evil acts...that can be explained away by the science of
the mind but the evil performed by those who do evil because it is
their nature, because they are evil. In the era that has spawned such
as Fred and Rosemary West, that is certainly something worth arguing
about. But the psychological simplifications implicit in such a position is a major flaw in a novel billed as literary and geared, in part at least, to attract readers (a Connolly quote) who might ordinarily shun genre fiction.
What remains is a pain-stakingly researched crime novel, impressive
both in terms of its driven central character, its scrupulously evoked
geography (Brooklyn, West Virginia and New Orleans), but also in its
cultural frame of reference (sixteenth century medical textbooks, the
seventeenth century metaphysical poets). Impressive too, is the
superior, top-flight prose and sheer momentum of the plot. Few readers
will feel short-changed. The hard-back price makes it something of a
bargain too.
Every Dead Thing by
John Connolly