Category: Wildfire

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Phoebe Locke, Publisher, Setting, TBR40, UK, USA, Wildfire

‘The Tall Man’ by Phoebe Locke

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Wildfire; 368 pages; 2018.

A few years ago I watched the documentary Beware the Slenderman about a pair of young American schoolgirls who attempted to murder one of their friends. Their motive was to appease “Slender Man”, a fictional monster whom they believed was true, and which had originated as a horror-related meme on the internet. (You can read more about Slender Man via this Wikipedia entry.)

Phoebe Locke’s The Tall Man uses this incident, albeit translated to the UK, as the basis of her creepy, psychological suspense novel.

Divided into three separate storylines set in three different time periods (1990, 2000 and 2018), it largely follows the exploits of 18-year-old Amber Tanner, who is the subject of a documentary film project. Self-obsessed and self-aware, she’s very much a closed shop and the documentary makers are having a hard time getting her to open up about the murder she committed a year or so ago.

This storyline is intertwined with two earlier ones. The first focuses on Amber’s upbringing in rural England, abandoned as a young baby and raised by her father single-handedly to become a too-good-to-be-true devoted daughter, while the second charts how her mother, Sadie, having devoted herself to a sinister figure known as “the tall man” in her childhood, spends her adult life frightened of him because of his deep desire to steal daughters and, in particular, hers.

Eventually, each of these three storylines coalesces into a powerful, if somewhat disappointing, ending, but this isn’t your average psychological thriller. Locke weaves in elements of horror, suspense and the supernatural to create a story right out of the Stephen King playbook.

An author in control of her story

She cleverly keeps certain “clues” at bay, so you are never quite sure who Amber killed until the very end, nor do you know whether Amber really believes in the Tall Man or whether she might just be using him as an excuse for her murderous behaviour.

And while Amber and Sadie aren’t particularly likeable characters (making it difficult for the reader to empathise with either of them), the young filmmaker Greta and the unreasonable demands she experiences from her boss provides an additional element to the story, including the ethics of documentary making and the ways in which young people are taken advantage of in the workplace.

Ultimately The Tall Man is an unsettling read rather than a thrilling one. There’s a few twists and turns along the way and the chopped up storylines provide an element of tension. The characterisation, particularly of Amber (elusive and narcissistic), Sadie (frightened, scatty and reliant on alcohol) and Greta (professional, ambitious but with a strong moral compass) gives weight to what might otherwise have been a fairly mediocre story.

This is my 3rd book for #TBR40. I purchased it last year as a Kindle 99p special having wondered if it might be based on the “Beware the Slenderman” documentary that had so freaked me out when I watched it on TV a few years ago. I’ve been fascinated by this modern legend ever since.

Australia, Author, Book review, Chris Hammer, crime/thriller, Fiction, Publisher, Setting, Wildfire

‘Scrublands’ by Chris Hammer

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Fiction – hardcover; Wildfire; 496 pages; 2019. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Fans of Jane Harper’s The Dry are going to love this debut crime novel by Chris Hammer. As well as a similar setting — a drought-stricken country town in Australia — Scrublands is similarly fast-paced, full of unexpected twists and turns, and an ending I never saw coming.

But the tale is more complex than Harper’s and is told from the perspective of a 40-year-old journalist (instead of a police investigator) who has an intriguing back story.

I’ll wager that it will win just as many awards as The Dry, perhaps even more so, and promises to turn Hammer into an international star. (It has already been optioned for television.)

Murder in a drought-stricken town

Set during the devastating Millennium drought, the story focuses on an appalling crime committed in a small (fictional) Riverina town — the murder of five men in church by a charismatic and popular young priest with a gun, who, in turn, is shot dead by police.

When the novel begins it’s a year after the fact, and newspaper reporter Martin Scarsden has been sent to Riversend to write a colour piece on the impact of the crime on the town’s residents. It’s the kind of “soft” job he (and his editor) hopes will allow him to rediscover his journalistic mojo, for Scarsden is battle-weary and psychologically damaged after a stint as a foreign correspondent in the Gaza Strip, where he was held hostage.

Within days of him arriving in town, the bodies of two German backpackers are discovered in a local dam and suddenly the world and its media are in Riversend wanting to know more. Scarsden has the inside scoop — and the reliable contacts — and his front-page stories dominate the news agenda.

But then it all gets a bit messy, and he becomes front-page news himself when one of his contacts commits suicide and blames Scarsden for his decision.

Brilliant plot and great characters

Scrublands is brilliantly plotted — but it has to be. There are two very different crimes at the heart of it, which makes for a convoluted story, but there are other asides (or red herrings), including a decades-old rape, that add to the complexity.

Occasionally it is difficult to follow what is going on and I lost the thread of who did what to whom and why, but it hardly matters. The story is so fast-paced and so evocative — of small-town life in places starved of economic investment, of frenzied media packs chasing ratings and circulation figures, of scorching summer days when the temperature hits 30C before 10am — it feels like a totally immersive experience.

But it’s the characters that make this book such a gripping read. Scarsdale is damaged but he’s not without heart: he still cares about the job, even if he sometimes does dubious things, and he’s prepared to put in the hard graft to get a good story. He even has a romantic fling with the local small-town beauty (an interesting character in her own right), perhaps the only “off” note in an otherwise atypical crime novel.

The town’s local characters — the general store owner, the local cop, the derro who wanders the streets, the teenage thugs, the hermit and the ASIO agent — are all incredibly well drawn (even if their names are all a bit odd). Even the dead priest, who we only ever hear about via third parties, is deeply intriguing, the kind of person you’re anxious to know more about.

And the town of Riversend, with its closed-down pub, crumbling motel and shops that only open a couple of times a week, feels like a very real place on the map.

Combine that with a twisty narrative, authentic dialogue and skilful writing and you have a novel that’s difficult to put down. It’s an ambitious first novel and one that’s not without its faults, but it’s an impressive debut. I can’t wait to see what Hammer delivers next.

Scrublands will be published in the UK and the US on 8 January 2019.