I don’t know who I would recommend this book to at all but I know that person wouldn’t have otherwise been me.
There’s a lot going on with this book: mystery, folk horror, urban wyrd (which is apparently an English subgenere), as well as running commentaries on police brutality and gentrification. I’m not sure it all works — and at times it is a bit wobbly — but I enjoyed reading it.
There was something about Tariq Goddard’s storytelling that made me really connect with this despite having little resonance with the plot or characters. I realize the dialogue and characterization are a bit esoteric for my tastes but I was hooked on how exactly he used dialogue and characterization to paint a bizarre and interesting picture of urban-ish rural England.
There’s a bit of a Wicker Man aspect too. I definitely thought of Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home, which I read last year. But more than anything, the cultish aspect felt like the most solid part: a commentary on Brexit and English society.
I don’t share the morbid fascination others do with Jeffrey Epstein but what I appreciated about the Netflix doc was the focus on how the girls in his Florida orbit were from the wrong side of the West Palm tracks. There wasn’t a sordid global cabal behind this, just a rich man preying on poor girls. Tale as old as time. This book hits that mark exactly: how easy young people are exploited and used for the whims of others. For a book that had some supernatural overtones, the culture commentary was stronger than I could’ve expected.
I can’t recommend this to most of y’all but this guy just hit with me. I’m definitely going to have to reread it to see what I missed.
BTW, I got this as a gift from my Cannonballer from two years ago. It was on my list mostly because it’s not in any Stateside bookstores. So thank you once more to that awesome person!
