lightreads

Judas Coyne (born Justin Cowzynski) is an aging rock star with a lot of bad memories, a girlfriend thirty years younger than him, and a collection of macabre and disturbing memorabilia. And then he buys a dead man’s suit off an auction site, and the dead man’s ghost with it. And this ghost ain’t nobody’s Casper – he’s a scary mother-fucker with a background in psychological torture, hypnotism, and razor blades.

I don’t generally go rooting around in the horror genre, preferring to stick to recommendations. I mean, if I really want a dose of repulsive people doing horrifying things to each other, I read the newspaper. But I do keep taking recommendations, because when horror is done right, oh yeah will I take that ride. Being horrified and repulsed by a book is not something I enjoy; being horrified and repulsed because it is deeply compelling is the sort of psychological rollercoaster that you just can’t get any other way.

This book does it right. Oh does it ever. It comes down hard as a ton of bricks but with the precision of an expert marksman on some viscerally frightening buttons, and I say this as someone who’s pretty jaded on that front. More importantly for me, though, Jude is a selfish, sometimes violent man, still alive after a lot of hell and honestly miserable that it can make him happy. He’s one of those guys who knows exactly how bad he treats people, and cares a bit, and doesn’t stop. In the hands of a lesser writer he would have been just a cog in the horror machine, and I never would have finished this book. Instead, he is wonderfully complicated, sad, complicit in terrible things, utterly fascinating, ultimately sympathetic. It’s damn impressive character work.

Mostly, it’s that the stellar characters and fast, to-the-face swipes of the plot are backed up with a subtle thematic argument about identity and responsibility and complicity. The book spends three hundred pages telling us that you can’t change it, you can only bear witness, that we’re all just walking ghosts of the happier people we were once, before the world or just our parents got to us. And then it turns around and says, ‘oh yeah? Bearing witness is doing something, and even ghosts can save themselves.’

It’s a fantastic debut novel. Hill does let his stitches show a bit too much for my taste – he cast two threads in the very beginning which I instantly and correctly marked as the central knot of the end game, and I saw a few too many turns coming. But I mostly didn’t care. I want to read Hill’s next book, but more than that, I really want to read his fifth book, his eighth. Because those are going to be something else.

The sharp-eyed will be noting the thing I didn’t talk about here. I‘m really not someone who takes an author’s wishes about how he is to be perceived and reviewed as gospel, but in this case I respect Hill’s expressed wish, in both senses of the word. And contrary to every newspaper in the western world, I find it is not just possible to talk about this book without talking about the thing, but also preferable.