The Orphan Choir by Sophie Hannah

The Orphan Choir is the third novel I've read in Hammer's series of horror novels by by non-horror authors - the others being Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat, which I loved, and Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate, which I wanted to love but didn't. By crime writer and poet Sophie Hannah, The Orphan Choir is part ghost story, part psychological thriller, with a tense, oppressive atmosphere and an intriguingly unreliable narrator.

The story opens with narrator Louise driven to distraction by a feckless, selfish neighbour who plagues her regularly with his loud music. (If Louise's reaction to this seems extreme, I speak as someone who once suffered a similar problem with my own neighbour and I assure that Louise's taut, paranoid fury is all too plausible.) Despite the support of Pat Jervis, the Environmental Health Officer who arrives to investigate the noise in the middle of the night, the noise continues - and this time, it seems that Louise's neighbour has found a new way to torment her. He's stopped playing his former repertoire of 80s hits, and instead, he's moved on to choral church music, sung by boy choristers. Desperately missing  her seven-year-old son Joseph, who has recently begun boarding at a prestigious choir school and feeling horribly claustrophobic as work on the exterior of the house generates endless dust and blocks out natural light, Louise appears to descend into obsession and hysteria. A second home in an almost disturbingly peaceful gated community in the countryside could be the answer ... or will the voices of the choir follow her there too?

One of the great successes of The Orphan Choir is the deftly constructed narrative. It's Louise herself who tells the story, and it's often hard for the reader to gauge the state of Louise's mental health - just at is for her occasionally dismissive but ultimately confused husband Stuart. Louise is sharply witty and observant but she's also prone to paranoia and erratic behaviour at times. Could the biggest danger faced by Louise, and even her son Joseph, actually be Louise herself? Is it possible that the voices she hears and the visions she sees are figments of an increasingly over-active imagination? In this sense, I heard echoes of The Turn of the Screw in The Orphan Choir, and that, of course, can only be an excellent thing.

The Orphan Choir works well, then, as a psychological mystery - but what of the ghost story? Well, I'm glad to say that Sophie Hannah has made a fine job of her foray into supernatural horror, and Hannah has an excellent command of those essential elements of eerie, slowly escalating suspense characteristic of all the best ghost literature. I found The Orphan Choir tense, chilling and unsettling, and it seems clear to me that Sophie Hannah has a genuine respect and understanding for the genre (something I found sadly lacking in Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate).

This is a short read, into which Sophie Hannah has somehow managed to pack numerous twists without ever making this slim little volume feel rushed or over-complicated: the careful layering of tension and atmosphere is executed at the perfect pace as The Orphan Choir edges creepily towards its climax. Suitably for a novel with Hammer connections, there's a strong gothic flavour, but it's employed in a modern setting, to excellent effect. The Orphan Choir is a beautifully constructed, atmospheric chiller which I highly recommend - and if you've got time to read it one sitting, so much the better, as once you get to the halfway point, you won't want to put it down.

Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux

In an age when our written words are more publicly available than ever, thanks to blogging, social networking, self-published e-books and internet message boards, Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies presents us with a prospect that seems even more sinister than it otherwise might: the notion that our personalities, our consciousness, our very being, could be reproduced solely from our written output.

Told through a combination of written forms including a psychiatrist’s case notes and the memoir of one of her patients, Strange Bodies explores some expansive themes, including identity, our thirst for immortality, scientific ethics and what really makes us the people we are.

Like Theroux’s dystopian novel Far North, which I've also reviewed, Strange Bodies has many of the trappings of science-fiction, but this is almost incidental – genre-wise, this is literary fiction more akin to, say, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or the speculative works of Margaret Atwood than full-on sci-fi. The plot has all the drive and thrust of a thriller, with Nicholas Slopen, an academic whose specialism is the life and work of Samuel Johnson, finding himself pulled into a dangerous scientific conspiracy growing from a seed planted in the former Soviet Union, but Strange Bodies is much more than that. It’s also a thought-provoking novel about language and how it shapes our identities and relationships.

Nicholas is a convincingly inept hero with numerous faults, although his growing awareness of them and his increasingly heightened understanding as the story unfolds mean it’s impossible for the reader not to sympathise with him, often deeply, and his relationship with Jack, an outwardly brutish savant with a seemingly unique talent, is perhaps one of the most touching elements of the book. Theroux also paints a vivid and plausible picture of the fluctuating mental health of Nicholas, and others, throughout: sometimes the fear of madness (as Samuel Johnson himself knew only too well) is worse than madness itself.

Weaving in numerous literary allusions and references, as well as elements of Frankenstein and age-old myths of doppelgangers and golems, Strange Bodies is an exceptionally well-executed novel, often sharply observant, in which the different themes interlock with the neat intricacy of meticulously-crafted clockwork.

Accidents Happen by Louise Millar

If you're looking for a page-turning psychological thriller to read on holiday, you could do worse than Louise Millar's Accidents Happen - if SJ Watson's Before I Go To Sleep is your kind of thing, perhaps. Don't, however, turn to this one for gritty realism: it's not strong on plausibility.

The protagonist of Accidents Happen is Kate, an affluent middle-class widow who, after losing first her parents and then her husband in tragic circumstances, has been left convinced that she is 'cursed' and suffering from an anxiety disorder somewhere on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, constantly running through statistics and probability sums in her head in order to reduce the risk inherent in everything she or her 10-year-old son Jack does. As her anxiety spirals so far out of control that her wealthy in-laws are concerned for Jack's welfare, Kate meets Jago, a professor of maths who has recently published a book about risk in the 'popular science' genre. Jago is certain he can help Kate to overcome her problems with a sort of immersion therapy, encouraging her to carry out what amount to grown-up dares to re-accustom herself to minor risk-taking, and his approach seems to be working. Yet Kate still has a nagging doubt that someone or something may be gaining access to her house, and Jack seems to share the same fear. Are they so consumed by Kate's neuroses that they are seeing dangers where none exist? Or could this be the one and only time when Kate and Jack really are in danger?

The basic premise of Accidents Happen is an original one, and one that captured my attention right from the start. I could easily see that Kate's problem was entirely credible, given her history, and found her an easy character with whom to sympathise as she tries to do the best for her son in parallel with the well-meant but sometimes stifling input of her late husband's family. Jack, too, is wholly believable: at almost eleven, he's just at the age where a desire for more independence sometimes conflicts with day-to-day childhood doubts over outdoor sleepovers and walks down creepy country lanes.

Louise Millar withholds various snippets of information from us throughout the book to keep us turning the pages, revealing something significant every few chapters to keep up our interest and raise our suspicions. Accidents Happen is full of secrets and unspoken family tensions and as such, it's certainly a suspense-packed read. Where I think it falls down is in the characterisation of Jago, who is supposed to be a sufficiently likeable charmer to set Kate's heart fluttering for the first time after her husband's death, but merely came across to me as an insufferably smug pillock from whom any sensible woman would have walked away on date one, and in the ending, which I simply found so implausible as to be almost disappointing. I can't deny that it's been very cleverly worked out, but I just found it impossible to believe and executed at a pace that seemed rushed. I could have accepted how terribly unlikely it all was if it had been revealed more gradually, but having it all thrown at me within such a short space of time did give me, to quote Through The Looking Glass, the sensation of 'believing six impossible things before breakfast'.

Accidents Happen (again, rather like Before I Go To Sleep) is a book that benefits from a certain disengagement of one's brain when you read it. Try to forget that none of this would happen in a million years, and just sit back and enjoy it.

Fever by Mary Beth Keane

If you are as grimly fascinated as I am by epidemics and other mysterious disease outbreaks, you may well have heard of Typhoid Mary. Typhoid Mary was Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant living in New York at around the turn of the century, who became the first person ever to be identified as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, the often fatal fever which periodically broke out in the overcrowded, insanitary conditions of the city at the time. This in itself would be interesting enough, but what made Mary famous - or rather infamous - was that she repeatedly ignored warnings about her condition once released from quarantine and continued, under various false pretences, to undertake work as a cook, repeatedly infecting (and consequently killing) people who ate her food.

Fever is a fictionalised account of Mary Mallon's life, told largely from her point of view, although to a lesser extent, it is also the story of her infuriatingly feckless partner, Alfred. It's a fascinating tale and Mary Beth Keane builds a vivid picture of New York in the early 1900s, teeming with recent immigrants struggling to better themselves in desperate poverty, packed into tenement blocks, paying to sleep on cots in other people's kitchens, scrubbing clothes in Chinese laundries, selling cheap wooden toys from hired carts. This is a city in which horses that collapse on the job are left to rot in the street and boarding houses cram ten beds to a room and make their occupants share a single chamber pot. Yet at the same time, it's also a city in which a 14-year-old girl, as Mary is when she manages to survive the journey from County Tyrone to Ellis Island, can start her life all over again and make something of herself. Mary is an excellent cook, her skills sought after. It's Mary who supports Alfred, her partner, not the other way round; it's Mary who can save up enough of her wages to buy the very same hat her employer wears.

Mary herself is a complicated and - as you might expect - not always likeable character, and yet Mary Beth Keane has done an outstanding job in making her into someone with whom we can sympathise despite her often poor choices: Keane is extremely skilful when it comes to helping us understand Mary's decisions and rationale. The legality of her first enforced period in quarantine is dubious at best: separated from her partner and everything she knows, she is left with nothing to do to amuse herself, a strong and healthy woman surrounded by the dying and regularly subjected to humiliating tests and sampling while information is concealed from her and it's easy to see what a damaging effect this experience could be. Similarly, it becomes clear how and why cooking is so important to her, and why a life as a laundrywoman (the occupation chosen for her by the Department of Health when she is released) simply won't do: it's not just the poor wages and the exploitative hours, it's the lack of respect she commands, the lack of an opportunity to show that she's good at something, to create something to be proud of. Mary is intelligent, perceptive and tough, and she is probably not entirely wrong in her belief that 'They blamed her because she was opinionated, and Irish, and unmarried, and didn't bow to them.' 

I did at times find it hard to reconcile Mary's intelligence and determination with her relationship with Alfred, with whom, on and off, she lives. Like Mary, Alfred makes repeatedly poor choices, but unlike Mary, his choices are impulsive and ill-considered; also unlike Mary, he lacks determination and pragmatism and has a serious drink problem. I found it hard to understand what Mary saw in Alfred and why she continued to love him - but perhaps we all know someone who seems inexplicably tied to a partner who seems depressingly unsuitable for them.

If you already know, as I did, what happened to the real Mary Mallon, the plot of Fever contains few surprises, and in fact, even if you don't, it's pretty straightforward stuff with a rather episodic structure and nothing unexpected. But this is a novel full of atmosphere and crammed with arresting little details about a stage in New York's history that seems strangely out of control - a 'best of times, worst of times' sort of period, full of the excitement of an up-and-coming melting pot of city in which great things are happening, yet at the same time, strangely out of control. Skyscrapers are being built and scientific advances are being made in epidemiology and healthcare, yet at the same time, families are dying in appalling slum housing and working in dangerous sweatshops: among the smart, orderly new architecture of the growing city and its officious bureaucracy, there is a swarming, chaotic poverty for which the spread of a deadly disease becomes an apt metaphor.

The Chessmen by Peter May

The Chessmen is the final novel in Peter May’s crime trilogy set on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s remote Western Isles. I found the first instalment, The Blackhouse, interesting and atmospheric but flawed in terms of character development, but thought book two, The Lewis Man, was excellent.

Unfortunately I think The Chessmen is by far the weakest of the three. In its favour, it does have many of the features that attracted me to its predecessors, including sharply accurate descriptions of the beautiful but sometimes bleak island landscape and the realities, both positive and negative, of a life lived in such an environment; a strong lead character in returning islander and ex-policeman Fin Macleod; and evocative flashback sections that build up the interwoven back-stories of the characters, many of whom appear in all three novels (Donald Murray, teenage rebel turned Free Church minister, is perhaps the most interesting of these).

However, the plot of The Chessmen really did stretch my credulity past breaking point. I won’t reveal much about that, as this is essentially a whodunnit after all, but apart from the sheer unlikeliness of the murder plotline’s outcome, which I simply couldn’t believe for a second, we’re also expected to accept that Fin had a number of school friends who formed an internationally famous Celtic rock band for whom he was once a student roadie. This wouldn’t be too much of a stretch had the two previous instalments in the series not also had many lengthy flashbacks to Fin’s teen years in which this is barely mentioned, despite it obviously having been of enormous significance to him – and, at the time, the island itself.

Moreover, while the flashback scenes in the previous two books were the most absorbing chapters, revealing, chilling and full of atmosphere, I found it hard to care much about bickering resentment between a group of bored teenagers fighting over a girl.

The lack of development of Fin’s character and relationships in The Chessmen also disappointed me. His relationship with his former childhood sweetheart Marsaili seems to be at a sort of sulky stalemate throughout, and the son and grandchild he should still be getting to know barely appear, so the interesting implications of a man who has recently lost a little boy in hit-and-run accident suddenly finding himself with a whole new family are simply ignored.

I don’t know if Peter May has any intention of writing a fourth Isle of Lewis novel. If he does, I hope it’s a return to the strong form of The Lewis Man rather than more of what we see in The Chessmen.

Silent Saturday by Helen Grant

Silent Saturday is the first in a planned trilogy by Helen Grant, author of The Glass Demon, which I reviewed here, as well as a number of other acclaimed dark, mysterious YA thrillers. If you don’t generally consider yourself fan of YA fiction, don’t let the label put you off as there is nothing about Grant’s books that doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of adult readers and if you hadn’t been told in advance that Silent Saturday was YA fiction, the only clue you’d find is the age of the protagonist. The plot is complex, the characters are often ambiguous and we see some of the action unfold from the point of view of a psychopathic murderer, with few holds barred. Above all, unlike far too many YA authors, Helen Grant never, ever patronises her intended audience.

Seventeen-year-old Veerle lives on the outskirts of Brussels with her neurotic mother Claudine, who not only worries obsessively about Veerle’s safety but also relies on her as an interpreter. Bored with her suburban life and stifled by the over-protective Claudine, Veerle is understandably attracted to risky pursuits such as scaling practice walls at the local climbing centre. On her way home one winter night, she decides on impulse to investigate a flickering light in an abandoned building, and it’s there that she becomes involved with the Koekoeken, or Cuckoos, a secret society dedicated to breaking into empty properties. They don’t rob them, or vandalise them, or even squat in them – in fact, they generally perform a small maintenance task or improvement before they leave. What the Koekoeken have in common seems to a fascination with the very emptiness of the buildings they enter, from crumbling castles to the modern homes of holidaying millionaires or absent expats, and the thrill of the forbidden.

The very concept of the Koekoeken would probably have been enough to hold my interest as a subject for a novel in itself, so fascinated was I by the idea, but in fact, Silent Saturday also sees Veerle and her old childhood friend Kris pitted against a possible serial killer and raises intriguing questions about Veerle’s past that Veerle herself is strangely unable to answer. The plot is gripping, the atmosphere chillingly creepy, the characters extremely well-drawn. Veerle herself, for instance, is a likeable but utterly believable 17-year-old on the cusp of adulthood, defiant without being stereotypically rebellious, shrewd without being boringly sensible, capable of falling for a good-looking boy without losing her mind over him, occasionally vulnerable but never in need of rescuing. 

Helen Grant also somehow manages to make everything that happens in Silent Saturday remarkably plausible. If you’ve read novels with teenage/child detectives battling adult criminals and thought ‘But why the hell haven’t they just told the police?’ you won’t find yourself similarly irritated here: while the decisions Veerle and Kris make are not always wise ones, there is a clear and credible logic to them.

I loved the Brussels setting of Silent Saturday. Helen Grant builds a tremendous sense of sinister, foreboding atmosphere in the key scenes that makes this a genuinely chilling, tense read. The unique atmosphere of places – specifically empty places – is perfectly evoked with a fine-tuned eeriness. 

But there’s more than that: as a child, nothing fascinated me more than novels which revealed the casual everyday details of life in other European countries, and the Flemish setting of Silent Saturday is absolutely spot-on here. I am the sort of person who will never tire of visiting a foreign city and marvelling over small details like metro maps, the ranges of things sold by newsagents, TV commercials for mysterious sandwich spreads and weirdly unfamiliar fast-food chains. The very revelation that in Belgium, the church bells don’t ring on Easter Saturday because children are told that the bells have flown to Rome to collect the Easter eggs was frankly enough to make me hop up and down with joy. I realise it’s possibly odd to get so excited about other people’s Easter traditions or a reference to someone having a 'cellophane-wrapped sweet roll with jam in it' for breakfast, and maybe it’s just me, but anyway – Silent Saturday evokes that very feeling of slight unfamiliarity, that little insight into lives that differ in so many small but somehow significant details from our own. I also enjoyed the importance of language in the book, which comes partly from it being set in a country divided by its inhabitants’ mother tongues. Veerle’s French-speaking mother Claudine is isolated and frustrated by her inability to understand Flemish, making her a bitter outsider in her own native country, and the plot is kicked into action by Veerle losing her temper with a non-Flemish-speaking expat who criticises her English.

As I mentioned at the start, Silent Saturday is book one of a planned trilogy, so although it does work as a standalone read, don’t expect all your questions to be answered on the final page. There’s plenty of intrigue left for books two and three – and I for one can’t wait. If you have a teenager, particularly a teenage daughter, get them hooked on the Forbidden Spaces trilogy now; if you haven’t, enjoy Silent Saturday for yourself.

Light Boxes by Shane Jones

I don't much like talking about my own depression, and I don't like reading about other people's - certainly not in any detail, anyway. It's ... well, depressing. And more than that, it's just plain boring, in the same way that backache is boring, or indigestion. It’s not some sort of exciting, tortured melancholy of the kind you can imagine afflicting a Romantic poet in a billowing shirt. It’s just painfully monotonous and dully oppressive.

This is probably why the only book about depression to have really touched me in any way is Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (not only my favourite book about mental illness but also one of my favourite books full stop). I'd like to say the second was the one I finished reading at the weekend - Light Boxes by Shane Jones - but unfortunately it fell into the trap of becoming an extended metaphor for the Tortured Creative, letting itself (and me) down considerably.

Light Boxes is a poetic, surreal novella about a town suppressed by a seemingly everlasting February. There is a literal February – bitterly cold, dark and grey with no Christmas to look forward to – and a personification of it, a strange, god-like ‘creator’ in the sky who appears to have a lot in common with writers of novels. The townspeople, whose principal interest flight, have been forbidden by February to fly their strangely life-affirming balloons, and their children begin to disappear. Stricken with a horrible sense of desolation, the townspeople declare war on February in a bid to bring the joy and hope back into their lives, 'that sadness will rise from our bones and evaporate in the sunlight the way morning fog burns off the river in summer'. 

Light Boxes is certainly a book that would benefit from repeated re-reading, as despite its low page count, each carefully crafted sentence is packed with meaning, and there are allusions and imagery to be deciphered in every line. There are constant surprises, too: stark realism will sometimes break through the whimsical fantasy, such as February’s own hopelessly inadequate list of 'possible cures' - 'Yoga and meditation; Consumption of St John's Wort; Mood diary' - and the use of ‘light boxes’ to beat the gloom of winter.

There are a number of characters from whose point of view the story is told, although I felt they were ciphers rather than fully-realised individuals, and where I felt Light Boxes became disappointing was when we began to learn more about February himself, who is flagged up not as the personification of depression itself but as an obvious parallel to a miserable writer, creating a fairy tale fantasy world 'to try to cure bouts of sadness', like the ones listed (clunkily) in the middle of the book. Apparently in love with a girl 'who smells of honey and smoke' and desperate to prove something to her, he begins to behave like an Old Testament God, crushing his characters into bleak conformity and meting out vengeful punishments for their rebellions. Certainly the loss of their children and the toxic moss which creeps over everything in its path and kills their livestock have the hint of Biblical plagues about them. 

Heavily conceptual and low on plot, Light Boxes is surprisingly engaging for what is essentially an extended metaphor in the form of a short novel. But for me, when it all becomes clear that February is essentially the sort of person whom I can imagine live-tweeting his mental anguish, the shrewd truths within this otherwise touching fairy tale are sadly diluted.