I was hooked by the premise of this story. I still am. I love the idea of LAPD homicide detectives having to get their heads around the existence of dI was hooked by the premise of this story. I still am. I love the idea of LAPD homicide detectives having to get their heads around the existence of demons. Unfortunately, by the end of the twelth chapter, 22% through the book, I was still at the point where the two newly partnered detectives were scratching their heads and asking, "Do you think there's something odd about a murder where someone gets their head ripped off but has no other injuries?" Well, duh!
So far, apart from an offstage growl in the first, slightly cheesy chapter, there hasn't been a demon in sight.
What there has been is a slow, sometimes painfully slow, set up on the backgrounds of both of the detectives and how they came to work together.
That might have been fine with if there'd been a little more foreshadowing of the woo woo stuff and if the chapters had been better written.
Overall, I thought the story had potential. Some of the banter/verbal aggression between the cops works well. I liked the grim but believable dark humour. The pace felt so slow that if I'd been watching a movie I'd have fast-forwarded to the interesting stuff.
The main reason I'm setting this aside is that the style of writing doesn't work for me. The characters all sound the same when they talk. The prose is utilitarian but not sparse. It gets the job done but it sounds like a student padding a report with bigger words to give it more authority. It made me sigh when it should have made me shiver and it wasn't holding my attention.
If it the story gets made into a movie, I'd watch it. If someone edits it down to a short story, I'd give it a try. I just can't make it through 347 pages of this style of writing....more
In her afterword, Kimi Cunningham Grant says that her title for this book, before the marketing folks replaced it, was 'Wilderness'. Having rea[image]
In her afterword, Kimi Cunningham Grant says that her title for this book, before the marketing folks replaced it, was 'Wilderness'. Having read the book, 'Wilderness' sounds like a perfect fit as hysical and emotional/spiritual wildernesses provide the landscape for the book. I still have no idea what 'The Nature Of Disappearing' means. It sounds like something generated in a blue sky session tasked with coming up with a title that sounds intellectual in an unthreatening way while hinting at danger and mystery.
The physical wilderness is almost a character in its own right. It's described in a way that made me want to put my boots on and head for the forest while also reminding me of how indifferent that landscape is to me and my needs and how easily I could come to harm.
Emlyn, the main character, is comfortable moving through the Idaho wilderness. She's a fishing guide and a competent tracker who knows how to survive alone in the wild. When we first meet her, she still trying to navigate her way out of an emotional/spiritual wilderness that she has inhabited since having a near-death experience after being betrayed by a friend. Although Emlyn can confidently read sign well enough to track people through the forest, she no longer trusts her ability to read the people around her well enough to trust them. Her life has been fractured, leaving her adrift, uncertain and anxious.
What I admired most about this book was that Kimi Cunningham Grant managed to create a physical journey fraught with danger, laced with mystery and culminating in life-threatening violence that also pushes Emlyn to find the clarity, courage and will to bring herself out of the physical and emotional wilderness and reclaim her life. The journey was immersive and tense but also found room for reflection that gave the events meaning beyond simple survival.
The story is told as a present-day narrative, enhanced with scenes from Emlyn's past. I liked that the start of the book didn't rush to action. It built a context by mapping personal histories and seeding a sort of retrospective foreboding regarding a yet-to-be-specified-in-detail life-changing incident in which Emiyn was betrayed. The narrative keeps approaching it sideways as if peeking at it through its fingers. The aim here isn't to tantalise the reader by withholding key information as a traditional thriller might but rather to reflect how we actually deal with painful things that we know and want to forget.
The first half of the book spends a lot of time getting to know the cautious, withdrawn, emotionally fragile person that Emlyn is now and is learning who she was five plus years earlier at college when she formed a close friendship with her charismatic friend, Janessa and fell in love with Tyler, the man who she'd expected to spend her life with but who we know betrayed her. I found myself deeply engaged with Emlyn both before and after the big betrayal. I liked her honesty. I loved that she wasn't perfect and was aware of her own faults. That she didn't always know why she did things when she was doing them, She would do harmful things that she knew she would probably regret but in the moment of doing them she wanted to cause harm or at least wanted it enough not to stop herself. It felt true. It also made me want to go: "No, no, no! Don't say that."
By the second half of the book, the dual timelines (Now and 5 Years Ago) started to amplify each other, building tension and increasing the sense of imminent disaster. I found Emlyn's rising anxiety hard to distance myself from or dismiss. Her fragility and her uncertainty and her history of being broken made being close to her unsettling.
The most unsettling thing was her awareness of her own uncertainty. It wasn't indecision. She understood that deciding wouldn't be enough. Metaphorically, she was walking a cliff path in fog, knowing that it's the step after the next one that's uncertain and may perhaps be fatal.
The only thing that Emlyn is certain of is that if Janessa, from whom she has become estranged, is missing in the wilderness, then she will go and find her, even if it means travelling with Tyler the man who derailed her life five years earlier.
The complex and conflicting relationships with Janessa and Tyler strengthened the narrative. The mystery around why and how Janessa went missing was a good one. The denouement was violent, credible, unexpected and satisfying.
If you're looking for a book with a wilderness setting, a mystery to solve, a dramatic finale and which manages to get you thinking about trust and hope and how we see ourselves and each other, then 'The Nature Of Disappearing' is the one you want....more
I bought 'The Christmas Guest' for two reasons: to sample Peter Swanson's work and to have a good Christmas story to listen to in the car as my wife aI bought 'The Christmas Guest' for two reasons: to sample Peter Swanson's work and to have a good Christmas story to listen to in the car as my wife and I drove North to be with family. It exceeded my expectations on both counts.
I love the way Peter Swanson writes: the clarity of the prose, the clever structure of the storytelling, the perfectly conjured settings and the believable characters. I'm now looking forward to reading his thriller, 'The Kind Worth Killing' later this year.
For me, 'The Christmas Guest' is an example of what a good, dark, Christmas story should be.
It takes place in two classic settings for Christmas stories, a Manhattan condo and an English country house. It starts in a present-day Christmas, with a woman in her thirties, who has chosen to spend the holiday alone in her apartment, again, deciding to do a bit of decluttering and coming across a handwritten journal that describes a much earlier Christmas, spent in an English country house, when she was a teenager, attending the Courtauld Institute of Art. The next part of the story is told through diary entries, describing how a young American girl gets to spend her first Christmas in rural England at the home of a fellow student. The tone of the storytelling changes as the young woman describes the almost overwhelming newness and strangeness of a Christmas spent in a big house in the woods. It darkens slowly and she observes some of the dark dynamics in the family and develops a sense of threat when she becomes aware that someone is lurking in the woods between the house and the village and that a young girl was recently killed in those woods.
I found both setting and the 'voices' through which they were told convincing and engaging. At the start of the story, I identified with the desire for solitude at Christmas and I smiled at the woman's pleasure in having an opportunity to declutter undisturbed. The shift to reading the decades-old diary entries gave a reflective, visiting the spirit of Christmas Past tone to the story that I enjoyed, as did moving from seeing the world through the eyes of a middle-aged woman settled into a solitary life through to a teenaged woman, abroad for the first time and open to everything the experience has to offer.
But there was much more to this story than some Christmas reminiscences. This is a dark tale, filled with life-threatening secrets and transgressions. Peter Swanson did a superb job in structuring and pacing his story to create a growing sense of threat while increasing my investment in the person threatened.
Then came the twist that changed my understanding of everything and made the story richer and much darker. It wasn't a last-minute cheat of a twist. Peter Swanson had constructed the whole story around it. The twist drives the story to the very last page.
I ended the story deeply satisfied with the journey that Peter Swanson had taken me on. It was a Christmas gift in it's own right.
I recommend the audiobook version of 'The Christmas Guest' narrated by Esther Wane who did a splendid job of matching her narration to the shifting tones of the text....more
I devoured Bad Men in two days and enjoyed every minute of it. It was fresh, energetic, funny, dark, violent and clever.
It has severed heads, multiplI devoured Bad Men in two days and enjoyed every minute of it. It was fresh, energetic, funny, dark, violent and clever.
It has severed heads, multiple serial killers, multiple bad men who, for once, get what they deserve, a cute dog in great peril and two engaging main characters: Saffy, smart, beautiful, single and wealthy, who killed her first bad man when she was twelve and now hunts and murders them as a hobby and Jonathan, a true-crime podcaster whose obsession with murder has destroyed his marriage and is about to put his life in danger.
I won't go into the details of the plot because that would spoil the fun but I will say that it has so many twists that even when I reached the epilogue my ideas of what had been going on and who had made it happen and why continued to be reset.
Bad Men is a wonderful mix of violent thriller and RomCom which gleefully twists the conventions of both genres to do surprising things, many of which involve attacking the patriarchy with wit and sharp blades.
This book made me laugh and it kept me guessing. Saffy is a killer who may or may not be a sociopath yet I found myself cheering her on in her endeavours both to win Jonathan's affections and to rid the world of some despicable men.
I recommend the audiobook version, narrated by Nathalie Buscombe
If you'd like to hear how Julie Mae Cohen came to write Bad Men, listen to her interview with Zoe Ball on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club (you will have to sign in to BBC Sounds)...more
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