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Post by Calenture on Mar 9, 2008 15:11:27 GMT
Down River by Stephen Gallagher, (NEL, 1989)Another old one.  All his life Johnny Mays has tried to emulate his childhood friend Nick Frazier. Now Frazier is a plainclothes cop and is less than delighted to find he's been partnered with Mays. He discovers that Johnny uses unorthodox, brutal methods to get results; and Johnny keeps a little black 'grudge' book. Mays is a small boy in a man's body. And he's paranoid. Nick learns too late that Johnny is beyond help when Johnny challenges a bunch of young joyriders to a race. The race between the joyriders' BMW and Mays' Capri is breathtaking - you can hear the tyres shrieking. It's a pursuit which ends in both cars plunging into a river and a row of bodybags on the bank. But Johnny Mays body is not among them. Johnny has gone over the edge in more senses than one. And now, a walking dead man wearing a dead man's oversized coat, he shambles through the world like a scarecrow hunting down those whose names have been entered in the book. Only one clue guides Nick in his personal hunt for Johnny: Johnny has never got over his childhood rejection by Alice Craig, and now fixates and preys on women who remind him of her. This is a superb thriller by the author of Rain. Its opening scenes have a curiously 'American' feel - it's as if Gallagher is still influenced by research for his own earlier work City of Lights, for which he travelled to America to gain background knowledge. But the book then moves confidently into a bleak British landscape of run-down industrial towns, gone-to-seed council high rises and Alice Craig's superbly evoked disused amusement arcade home. A brilliant if ultimately rather bleak piece of writing by one of Britain's best young authors. Recommended.
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