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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 22, 2022 22:25:41 GMT
Stephen M. Irwin - The Darkening (Sphere Books 2009, 396 pages), aka The Dead Path in Australia.  Blurb: The dark trunks stood like a row of black teeth, endlessly huge, stretching into the night. Waking as they scented prey...
After his wife's sudden death, Nick Close returns to his hometown in Australia. He is still haunted by the murder of his friend Tristram thirty years ago, and a strange sense of foreboding now overshadows his arrival. Soon after a child's body is found in the woods at the edge of town, a death that closely echoes Tristam's.
Quietly probing into the town's secrets, Nick uncovers a string of unexplained disappearances and brutal killings, some decades old. Every single one leads him back to the twisted maze of the woods. But there is one other connection, and Nick suddenly realises that it hadn't been Tristram who was meant to die...
Smart and gripping, The Darkening is one of the most chilling debuts in supernatural suspense.
I read this a few years ago, but don't remember much about it now other than that I enjoyed it. A key point I had completely forgotten is that, as a result of a couple of head injuries (the first due to a motorcycle accident on the same night as his wife's death), Nick now sees dead people - more precisely, he sees the last few moments leading up to a violent or sudden death, played out in front of him on a continuous loop, when he is in a location where such a death has occurred. Importantly, he only sees the actions of the victim and there is no soundtrack accompanying his visions. So, Nick is back in his hometown in Australia, staying with his mother in his childhood home. We get a bit of the backstory of what happened to his friend Tristram (someone confessed to the murder and led the cops to the body, but no motive was ever established - the killer himself could offer no explanation, and committed suicide in his cell) and now, 30 years later, another child has gone missing. Of course, Nick's abilities are going to play a part in resolving these mysteries - but he can't get all the answers from his visions (remember: he only sees the victim, and there is no sound). I am up to the start of Chapter 6 (p.66) and will try to keep this summary going without spoilers. I seem to be enjoying it second time around just as much as the first time. It's not exactly "pulp", but it has no pretensions to being high literature either.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jan 23, 2022 0:28:42 GMT
I read this years ago as The Dead Path. It's a witch novel and it was pretty good. It's always interesting to see how writers transpose these European ideas to an Australian setting - it seems to work in an American setting as there's a longer history of European settlement and there were witch trials and so on there, but it always seems a bit silly in Australia. On a similar note I watched The Last Wave the other day, a tribute to David Gulpilil who died recently - the 'witch' in that is an aboriginal elder and it works brilliantly well.
Stephen Irwin seems to have got into TV scriptwriting - looking him up on wikipedia he writes the Harrow series, a mildly amusing crime show set in Aus with Ioan Gruffud playing Harrow, a forensic pathologist.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 25, 2022 23:41:13 GMT
About one third in now, and can't really say anything about events that wouldn't be a spoiler, so will just list the horror elements that have been introduced - mysterious runes carved in various places around town, Green Man carvings in a 19th C. church that remind Nick of what he saw back in England just before he crashed his bike, and spiders... lots of spiders.
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Post by helrunar on Jan 26, 2022 1:52:23 GMT
That sounds intriguing, Dr Strange. 21st century authors are pretty iffy for me, but I am quite keen to hear any further comments you might decide to offer.
Also to note that I wrote a kind of essay review of The Last Wave some years ago (it was actually published in a minor, small press book in the UK called Unsung Horrors) and it made a tremendous impression upon me while I was working on it. I wonder if the movie is controversial in Australia nowadays due to plot points I am unable to discuss without major spoilers. Gupilil's performance was huge impressive to me. Would like to see Walkabout, his film debut, one of the years.
H.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jan 26, 2022 6:34:03 GMT
Also to note that I wrote a kind of essay review of The Last Wave some years ago (it was actually published in a minor, small press book in the UK called Unsung Horrors) and it made a tremendous impression upon me while I was working on it. I wonder if the movie is controversial in Australia nowadays due to plot points I am unable to discuss without major spoilers. Gupilil's performance was huge impressive to me. Would like to see Walkabout, his film debut, one of the years. H. It's one of my favourite films and David Gulpilil is terrific, as is Richard Chamberlain for that matter - later to play the sexy catholic priest in The Thorn Birds. I suspect the film is a bit culturally suspect these days, but it's heart is in the right place. And Peter Weir is an Aus icon. Great example of quiet horror - portents, dreams, ancient prophecies count for more than blood and gore (not that there's anything wrong with blood and gore!). |
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 26, 2022 10:50:42 GMT
That sounds intriguing, Dr Strange. 21st century authors are pretty iffy for me, but I am quite keen to hear any further comments you might decide to offer. As James said, there is something slightly odd about all these European pagan elements in a modern Australian setting - though if they migrated across the Atlantic to North America with European settlers, then why not to Australia too? The very last section that I read last night draws on the European "fairy tale" tradition - Nick gets lost in the woods when he is wandering about hoping to "see" something, he finds and eats some wild strawberries, starts feeling a bit odd, and then comes across a path that leads him to a cottage inhabited by an old crone and her "pet". I won't say what happens next, but it's pretty unpleasant. Apart from the venomous spiders, it would be easy to forget that the story is set in Australia - but maybe that really doesn't matter, or is even a good thing (personally, I can get a bit annoyed by "cultural references" that I don't understand in a story - things like brand names, TV shows, etc. that mean nothing to me). |
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 29, 2022 18:18:54 GMT
About half-way through now. After spending some time researching local history in the town library, Nick is convinced that he is dealing with "a woman a hundred and fifty years old killing little boys and girls to stave off her own death and, for some reason, to keep her dark woods whole". He also decides that he should try to kill her.
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