The Hiding Place

Image credit: Simon & Schuster Australia

Thinking back over some of the more modern books that I have read this year, a lot of them being Australian fiction, it’s fascinating to see that there is something about the way that they are written that causes you to visualise the narrative in terms of stage or screen – and this quite often is what makes them compelling. The Empress Murders definitely felt like a fast-paced farcical stage play to me while Unbury the Dead could have absolutely been an ABC miniseries. The next book that had me reading this way was Kate Mildenhall’s The Hiding Place, which I have just closed the cover on and am still reeling from.

When Lou sees an ad for an abandoned mining town up for sale, she is quick to convince her sister and lifelong friends to chip in and make it their own. An idyllic bushland paradise where the four families can come together on camping trips, get back in touch with nature, and escape from the pressures of their lives for a while. As they set off for their first weekend at Willow Creek, excitement and romantic dreams are high, only marred a little bit by a deer running a trailer off the road, a confrontation with the neighbour about incorrectly placed fences, and some squatters camped down by the river. But these problems pale in comparison to the fact that by the end of the first night, someone is dead.

An absolutely rollicking thriller set against the harshness and majesty of the Australian bush, The Hiding Place is a fantastic novel that follows a central cast of delightfully distasteful people who you cannot wait to see get their comeuppance. It reminded me of The Slap a little bit: a bunch of characters, each with their own dirty little secrets that they try desperately to keep and justify to themselves, put in a situation that causes everything to chaotically unravel.

Told in short chapters that follow the various characters, it delightfully depicts these long-lived friendships that have reached a point where the darker side of human nature has gone to seed. Rivalry, judgment of parenting techniques and lifestyle, self-righteousness, misogyny, and victim plays run rampant throughout the pages, bookended by wickedly funny opening and closing scenes of the general store where the locals are discussing those city folk who bought Willow Creek – and painting a wickedly apt picture of the type of people they are.

It’s a delightfully dirty book, one that encourages its readers to let their nastier sides wash over them, make sadistic little judgements about these characters, and then relish in the mentally, socially, and emotionally macabre way their lives spiral into the ground. You know it’s bad, but oh it’s so good. Salty-sweet like peanut butter and chocolate.

Image credit: Simon & Schuster Australia

And the readers are not the only ones enjoying making harsh judgements. Devilish comments on the moral degradation caused by capitalism, the pretentious farce that is glamping, and the difference between knowledge read and knowledge lived bring extra layers of drama, depth, and black comedy to the story.

Filled with drama, tension, and characters you love to hate, The Hiding Place is a wickedly fun thriller that I could not put down.

Author: Kate Mildenhall, 2025

Published: Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2025

Arborescence

Image credit: Hachette Australia

A reading experience can be many things. It can be immersive, disruptive, comforting, harrowing, scary, exhilarating, it can be anything and everything all at once sometimes. While we are tempted to measure the brilliance of a book by how positive we find the reading experience that it provides, that’s not always the best way to go about it. Sometimes we need to consider that the books that disturb and unsettle us are just as brilliant as the ones that excite and uplift us. Having been late on the last book for bookclub, this week I have gone to the other extreme and finished the book with almost a month to spare! It’s a cliché to gush that the brilliant thing about bookclubs is that they encourage you to read books that you ordinarily wouldn’t, but it’s one hundred per cent the case. A complete departure from the hilarious detective-noir farce that was The Empress Murders, this week’s read had me skeptical, curious, enthralled, unsettled, and dispirited. This week I’m talking about Rhett Davis’ Arborescence.

Bren works for a company that he doesn’t understand the point of with colleagues whom he has never met. His partner Caelyn cycles through jobs looking for something, though she’s not sure what. One day the couple discover a group of people in a nearby forest who believe that if they stand still for long enough, they will eventually take root and become trees. While Bren dismisses the idea as a weird cult ideology, Caelyn becomes fascinated by it. She goes back to university and writes articles about it and soon the two realise that the idea is spreading. People are going missing and trees are appearing in places where they weren’t before. Could arborescence really be true? As the world becomes greener and cities and technology stagger, Caelyn sees nothing to fear but Bren is not so sure.

Arborescence begins as a wholesome, almost hippy-dippy exploration about the bizarre and dysfunctional love triangle that is the human-technology-nature relationship. It then begins to slowly and eerily turn towards the avenue of thriller territory before suddenly taking a hard turn into the realm of dystopia. It’s a hugely provocative book, inspiring an absolute tirade of thought processes regarding the state of the world, the toxicity of humanity, what the human condition truly means and how it affects everything it around it, as well as social, economical, and natural evolution.

Davis writes in a structurally fragmented way to depict the erraticism of human thought processes while at the same time using prose that is rich, poetic, slow-moving, and even soothing. The disjointed paragraphs mixed with this soothing, measured language has an unsettling effect as it both startles and lulls the reader, diverting their attention away from the creeping doom that inches ever closer. This way, when the horror of the story does finally settle in, it’s truly upsetting enough to inspire stomach drops, gooseflesh, and shivers.

While I spent a fair potion of this book being captivated and then horrified, the remainder was spent feeling depressed as Davis really writes about two dystopias, one replacing the other. When the book starts in what I assume is the modern day, AI or ‘alternative intelligences’ are prevalent, running entire companies, issuing orders and workloads, and even hiring human actors as representatives when face-to-face interviews are required. It’s eerily science fiction without really being in that hyper-futuristic setting and the interactions between human and technology are so nonchalantly depicted that the strangeness of it doesn’t quite register until you realise that the ‘boss’ sitting across from Bren in the café is actually a man working for a robot. This technological dystopia that the book begins in establishes the shift in human relationships with one another, showing a lack of vibrance, energy, or spark. Perhaps I interpreted this on a more personal level as I’ve recently had to adjust to working remotely with all colleagues being online: isolation can really be a downer. By the time the natural dystopia takes root, Davis has raised so many questions about the changing flavour of human relationships that it’s hard to find the will to stand up.

Image credit: Curtis Brown

I think if I read this book again, it will be some years down the track, but I do think that it was brilliant! There is so much going on and being explored narratively, structurally, and socially. It really makes the mind whirl with theories, questions, anxieties, and hope. And while I haven’t come away from a read so depressed since The Great Gatsby, Davis does leave readers on a hopeful note. It’s certainly not a comfy, cosy read, but I think I would recommend Arborescence if you’re out for a challenge, a stimulant, or an emotional shakeup.

Author: Rhett Davis, 2025

Published: Hachette Australia, 2025

Tales of the Unexpected

 

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

To me, nothing seems like a worse omen than beginning a new year in a reading rut. It’s taken me more than a week to overcome it, but I’m finally here; having just closed to the cover on Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected: a book that took me way longer to finish than was necessary. 

Tales of the Unexpected is a collection of mature short stories from one of my favourite children’s authors. They share a common theme of strangeness, wackiness, and sinisterness, sadly with most of them finishing before you really sink your teeth into it. Beginning with a tale in which a father jokingly bets his daughter’s hand in marriage in a wine-tasting gamble and finishing with a couple who believe they have found the reincarnation of Liszt in a stray cat, Tales of the Unexpected can be best described as a quirky collection of Dahl’s experimental forays into genre. 

There’s a lot happening within its pages, ranging from thriller to science fiction, and potentially even horror. While some of the stories are dark and twistedly funny and satisfyingly whole, such as Lamb to the Slaughter, which tells the story of a women killing her husband with a leg of lamb and then feeding the murder weapon to the investigating officers, others read a little more like introductory snippets for a wider story that gets cut off as soon as some real drama starts happening. While every idea is different and interesting indeed, there are some definite hit and miss moments with stories landing a high score, while others left me wanting more. I think it was this strange mixture of complete and incomplete that made me struggle with this book. 

Image credit: Wikipedia

Although I was left feeling more or less unaffected by this book, I still believe that it’s worth delving into, as it shows a different and unexplored side of a celebrated author. There’s intelligence, versatility, and dark underlying humour in every tale. 

Author: Roald Dahl, 1954-69

Published: First seven published in Someone Like You, by Secker & Warburg, 1954. Remaining stories published in Kiss Kiss, by Michael Joseph, 1960. All stories published in Twenty-Nine Kisses From Roald Dahl, Michael Joseph 1969.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

 

Image credit: Goodreads

After a run of period classics in Moby Dick and Orlando, I determined that the next novel I read had to be completely different; a real turnaround from what I’d gotten used to. So, off the shelf came John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. 

I found this book a challenge. Perhaps I am just not particularly geared towards the spy novel –though to be fair I have not exposed myself to very many- but I found that I had to read a little extra stuff (the introduction and the author’s note at the end) to really appreciate what this book was and what it was doing. I can’t honestly say that it’s now a favourite, but I absolutely can appreciate why this book is so celebrated within literary circles. 

The book tells the story of Alec Leamas, a tired and cynical member of the British Secret Service who has been spying in the shadows of the Berlin Wall for years. After so long a time out in the cold, Control finally wants to bring him in: after one last assignment. Convinced to turn double agent, Alec travels deep into the heart of Communist Germany, smoothly eluding the wrong people and rubbing shoulders with the right ones. But disaster strikes when another agent attempts to help a woman whom Alec has befriended, and a shocking truth about the wider game comes to light. 

Spy is probably most celebrated because it redefined the spy novel genre. Up until the 1960s, the spy was the suave and smooth-talking James Bond type of character who went on adventures with action and exciting high stakes. The stakes are indeed high in Spy, but the setting is nowhere near as glamorous. Set against the harsh and grey background of the Cold War, Spy depicts the world of spies and espionage as a horrible game of chess where everything from humanity, morals, ideals, and indeed life are expendable and can be bought or sold for the right price. There’s a high level of cynicism, both in the plot and the book’s protagonist.

Image credit: The Washington Post

Alec Leamas is as far from a James Bond as one can get. Ragged, exhausted, dishevelled, and rough in every sense of the word, he is the protagonist that readers are saddled with, not emotionally attached to. The book’s central thrills and excitement do indeed come from the events that take place within its pages, which eventually all pool together to form the bigger picture. Given that the setting and characters are so sketchy to begin with, the reader takes all promises, events, and bouts of dialogue with a grain of salt, but even so it still comes a shock when the story –and the game- ends. 

Le Carre’s social commentary as well as some cheeky in-novel comments on the nature of the spy (both as a profession and a literary character) brings an extra level of intrigue to an already-heavily-laden black forest cake of a novel. This is definitely a book to read if you are into the spy genre.

Author: John le Carre, 1963

Published: V. Gollancz (London), 1963

Fight Club

Image credit: Dymocks

“The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.” It’s a line that has intrigued, mystified, and spooked readers and filmgoers alike for over a decade. Perhaps one of the most celebrated anarchist stories in circulation, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a literary classic for a reason and its translation into film has only strengthened the macabre injustices of society and the tragic ironies of the world that the book illustrates –and it’s only getting better with age!

Fight Club tells the story of a nameless insomniac protagonist that one day meets the charismatic Tyler Durden: a Devil-may-care anarchist sticking it to the rich one measly service shift at a time. Between peeing in bouillabaisse and splicing pornographic images into Disney films Tyler and our nice protagonist create fight club: a gathering of good men with white-collar jobs that comes together to beat the crap out of each other. As the club gains popularity black eyes and broken jaws are not the worst injuries to occur as Tyler soon puts his leadership and DIY chemistry skills to use and creates an army of anarchists on a mission to cleanse society. With the world on the verge of mayhem our insomniac protagonist must find out once and for all who is Tyler Durden?

This anarchist thriller of a novel proves to still arouse those inner feelings of morose waste and neglect of an overshadowed social class that have sitting inside all of us for years. You know the feeling: the idea that the world is indeed poisoned and so far gone into deterioration that the only thing that could bring it back is a few thousand volts. Palahnuik’s taut prose and tight sentence structure really highlights those feelings of disinterested loathing, creating a protagonist and a narrator’s voice that feels like he’s almost questioning the point of telling us this story.

Image credit: Yasmina Moya, The Cult

The book’s quick flashes between past and present is what keeps you turning pages, creating this almost urgent pace that counteracts with the narrator’s deliberately flat storytelling. And then of course there’s this fabulous twist that is semi-reminiscent of such unreliable narrators as those in The Tell-Tale Heart or The Turn of the Screw yet is simultaneously completely modern and fresh, bringing a classic trope of Gothic literature into a new era and almost turning it on its ear.

While it’s definitely not a book you can just pick up and read lightly –it definitely does take some mental preparation- Fight Club is a standout classic in modern literature as it provides scathing commentary on the state of the world, reintroduces classic narrative tropes with a twist, and poses a challenge for its readers.

Fight Club was written by Chuck Palahnuik and published 1996 and published in 1997 by W. W. Norton & Company Inc. New York.

The Yellow Wallpaper

The first reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s little literary masterpiece of a woman’s descent into madness puts us in mind of a genetic splice between Poe and Woolf. But in the hours you spend thinking about it after turning the last page, you realise that there is so much more going on. 

One of the most compelling works of feminist literature, The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a wife and mother who is forced into an isolated country holiday by her physician husband to cure a nervous breakdown. The nameless heroine, starved of intellectual stimulation, chronicles her feelings in secret as well as documents her feelings towards her bedroom’s repellent yellow wallpaper and her descent into madness as the patterns on it begin to consume her mind. 

Taken straight from her own experience, the story has a lot going on considering its length (a mere thirty-six pages long). On the surface, it reads as a Gothic horror complete with a nameless and faceless ‘unreliable’ narrator (unreliable as we quickly learns she’s going insane, though there’s an irony here that I’ll delve into later) a la Edgar Allen Poe. The short sentences and jagged paragraphs, never housing more than two or three sentences, are definitely not the lengthy and long-winded streams of consciousness that colour Woolf’s work, but still serve as a strong depiction of the heroine’s mind as well as tells entire stories and histories with few words. Through these techniques alone we are captivated and wrenched almost forcibly into a world seen through the heroine’s eyes. 

And this is where the true brilliance of the book comes through. The heroine becomes fixated on the wallpaper: hating it, being terrified of it, and then finally desperate to free the women trapped behind it that shake the patterns and make them move. Instantly, the wallpaper becomes a metaphor for marriage and the attitudes of a patriarchal society towards women. Victorian marriage and the demands on women to be wife, mother, and nothing more suddenly become the central villain of this chilling tale and there’s an eerie dramatic irony in the idea that this heroine (who is actually going mad and hallucinating) is simultaneously seeing the world for what it truly is: a structure of patriarchal inequality and female subjugation. Suddenly, everything you’ve read in the pages before takes on a different colour and a strong social commentary comes bursting out of the paper (to take an image from the story). 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s use of a popular mass-read genre, techniques reminiscent of other writers, and then brilliant use of metaphor makes The Yellow Wallpaper a wonderfully modern book as well as one that deals with themes that are relevant to this day. Everything from sexual to social attitudes are represented here, as well as perfect depictions of the relationships and attitudes between the sexes: not just men towards women, but also women towards women. It truly is a masterpiece that has not gotten the recognition that it deserves and I would strongly encourage people to change this by taking a mere hour out of their day to sit down and read it. 

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman 

Published: 1892

The Girl on the Train

Who doesn’t love a good thriller with an unreliable narrator? The Girl on the Train is exactly this! The first thriller from journalist Paula Hawkins, which has now been made into a great film starring Emily Blunt, The Girl on the Train is a fantastic and dark whodunit mystery told from the perspectives of three different women, all of which are unreliable or biased narrators. 

The book tells the story of Rachel, a divorced alcoholic who travels back and forth from London on the train every day. Along the track she always passes her old house, now occupied by her ex-husband and his new wife, Anna, as well as that of seemingly perfect couple Megan and Scott Hipwell. One morning she witnesses Megan kissing someone other than her husband, shattering her perfect illusion of her. That same day Megan goes missing and Rachel becomes embroiled in the mystery as the police say witnesses saw her in the area around the time of Megan’s disappearance. Try as she might, Rachel can’t remember anything she did that night, it’s all lost in a drunken blackout. But as Megan stays missing, it becomes an obsession for Rachel to find out what happened to her. 

Perhaps what is best about this book is how it takes the trope of the unreliable narrator, a timeless thriller technique used my many successful authors including Poe and James, and amps it up to 11. Whilst a predominant portion of the story is told by Rachel, an obvious flawed narrator due to her alcoholism, the rest of the story is split between the perspectives of Megan; the promiscuous maiden cheating on her husband, and Anna; the woman who stole Rachael’s husband. 

All three women work against one another as well as themselves to flesh out the mystery of the story and really bring out its complexities. Rachel is unreliable because she was drunk and cannot remember the events of the evening in question. Megan as a character is unreliable, as we see by her promiscuous behaviour, but also as a narrator as she withholds a lot of information about herself from the reader. Considering that the book is written in the first person in a diary-like way, the fact that Megan is still elusive and never really opens up (until it’s too late) makes her intriguing, but flaky. And then Anna’s unreliability stems from her hatred and fear of Rachel. Her chapters read more as a rant with Rachel haunting most of her thoughts. A haunted, angry, and slightly paranoid character, Anna pins everything on Rachel and pushes the reader in that direction too. 

This technique of three conflicting narrators is really great because it actually works to dissuade you from trying to tease out clues as to what really happened to Megan and so when the truth is revealed, it comes as a pretty substantial shock. 

What I loved too about the book was its tone during Rachel’s chapters in the beginning. As soon as the thriller aspect really gets rolling, the tone changes a bit and becomes less intrinsically personal, but during the opening chapters Rachel’s sections about the state of her life, her thoughts and whatnot, actually created a depressed drunken buzz in me! It’s hard to pinpoint what stimulated such a feeling, but as I was reading I felt the same as Rachel, my emotions actually mirrored that of the character I was reading about. I applaud Hawkins for that, I really do! 

The Girl on the Train is a captivating read; a modern whodunit thriller where the classic tropes of plot misdirection and the unreliable narrator get up-scaled for extra indulgence, I absolutely loved this book!

Author: Paula Hawlins

Published: 2015

Different Seasons

From the narrative master of horrors and thrillers comes this collection of four novellas that exhibit the lighter side of Stephen King. To give some perspective as to the types of stories we’re talking about, two of these tales were made into the cinematically brilliant and critically acclaimed films TheShawshank Redemption and Stand By Me! In Different Seasons, it’s a change of pace for King and a different type of story than we’re used to reading from him, making the book refreshing, confronting, and compelling. 

Hope Springs Eternal (‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’): This story chronicles the journey of federal prison inmate, Andy Dufresne, from his arrival in Shawshank Prison to his eventual escape. 

Narrated in the first person, it’s told from the point of view of inmate, Red, who observes Andy’s story with much detail and interest. Whilst it is technically a first-person register, the story does have this third-person omniscient tone that King manages to create beautifully in Red’s narration. In this way, readers get to learn so much intimate detail about two characters rather than just one and it’s this and Red’s relationship with Andy that makes the tale so beautiful. 

But despite the clever blend of the first and third person omniscient narration, I did find that sometimes the pace of the story would slow and become a bit of a drone making it hard to continually pick up and read. It pays to watch the film first as the scene-by-scene reruns that the mind is capable of adds to the page-turning inspiration. 

But negative aside, it’s a story of patience, bravery, incredible discipline and determination, and hope and it makes for a very compelling read. 

Summer of Corruption (‘The Apt Pupil’): Tells the story of a young, talented, and promising student who, out of some morbid fascination, tracks down a war criminal and entices him into a strange union that threatens them both as it progresses. 

Written in the third person, this story begins a little slow and then starts to heat up when the past of the elderly man that the boy befriends is revealed and their relationship starts to develop. Taking a sharp turn away from the hopeful feelings inspired by Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, this story explores the corruption of innocence and young potential in a really shocking and confronting way. 

King’s incredible attention to detail works to make the more dramatic and confronting scenes really gut-churning, whilst the nonchalant way in which he describes events through the alternating tones and perspectives of the two central characters, establishes a strong and growing sense of dread and serious disturbance. It’s gritty, and shocking, and so damned compelling. 

The Loss of Innocence (‘The Body’): This exhibition of bildungsroman (more or less ‘coming of age’) is the best in the book I think! It tells the story of four boys on the cusp of adolescence venturing into the woods to find the body of a missing boy, discovering life, death, and the loss of innocence along the way. 

A riveting story told in the first person register as a flashback, it’s one of King’s most intimate stories: entirely character-driven with an impeccable attention to detail of the culture being described. You do feel as though you are there in that town, in that year, at that time. Yes, of the four this is the best! 

A Winter’s Tale (‘The Breathing Method’): Depicts a man telling the story of a man who told a most incredible story about an unmarried pregnant woman determined to give birth…no matter what. 

Admittedly the weakest story in the book, this is the classic story within in a story and one thing that it does achieve quite successfully is create a sense of dread and anticipation without providing payoff at the end. Readers are left with so many unanswered questions, which is probably for the best, and no sense of justification for the effort put in to reading the story about the pregnant woman. 

Having said that, the story about the pregnant woman does provide some weird and horrible closure in the form of blood and horror, which King does all very well. 

It’s simply written and we don’t really get a good sense of any of the characters depicted, so it’s hard to say what it is that keeps us turning the pages. But we do. 

Amongst the intimate registers, empowering tones, and incredible and graphic detail, King also subtly references the tales within each other, which brings another level of enjoyment to the whole thing. Keep an eye out for references to Andy in ‘The Apt Pupil’: particularly enjoyable. 

Filled with action, violence, drama, suspense, growth, despair, and even a little comedy, Different Seasons is an apt title for this collection of novellas that demonstrate King’s ability to write stories with heart as well as horror.

The Quiet American

Written by Grahame Greene, this light thriller set against the hardships of 1950s war in Indochina is an exploration of the rising of American imperialism and the waning of European colonialism. Beginning closer to the end and working backwards to establish characters and their relationships with one another as well as the sequence of events that led to the eventual outcome, The Quiet American is quite an easy read, despite its fragmentation in terms of where we are time-wise, and Greene manages to pack a lot of power into the voice of his narrator, constructing a surprisingly deep and well-rounded story that is just shy of 200 pages. 

The ‘quiet American’ is Alden Pyle, a fresh-faced, innocent American youth who comes to Indochina with a head filled with the romantic and democratic ideals of authors. Blind to the way people really are, Pyle crosses paths with Fowler, a cynical British correspondent, and a shallow but somehow endurable friendship forms. Sent from America to promote democracy through a mysterious ‘Third Force’, Pyle’s innocence and naivety begins to cause great bloodshed and soon even the cynical, un-sided Fowler cannot sit on the fence and watch. But even as he starts to intervene he wonders why; is it for country, for equality, for morality, or for love? 

I began reading this book trying to muster as much neutrality as I could. It’s a text that I have to read for uni (I’m trying to get a head start before classes resume) and not usually something that I would go in for. But I discovered that this is actually a very deceptively complex book despite its length. Sitting at just shy of 200 pages (with pretty big typing too), The Quiet American is a story that explores more than just a love triangle and an unlikely friendship. It’s an exploration into morality, masculinity, and, of course, the patronising ‘paternalistic’ attitudes of the West towards the Orient. 

Orientalism works strongly within Greene’s story, both the beauty and exoticness of it as well as the poverty and ‘dis-civilisation’. Particularly in the character of Phuong, we see all that is beautiful and exotic about the East: Phuong is often compared to and held in association with flora, and Greene’s recurring associations with her and material exhibits both exoticness as well as a common link with the West in terms of materialism and consumerism: her silk trousers and collection of scarves. Then in comparison to the prettiness that is Phuong and the Orient, we also see the poverty and the dystopian side of it: Greene paints wonderful pictures of large families living on the floor of scrap warehouses, we see the crowded and humid squalor of opium dens and brothels, and whilst there is also a sort of exoticism in these less attractive pictures as well, they’re not as endearing as Phuong. 

We then have this exploration into what makes a man in the romance of Phuong with both Pyle and Fowler. Pyle enters with somewhat clichéd and conservative romanticisms about love and marriage whilst Fowler is the creature of habit, the experienced one in the pleasures of women, and whilst his offerings to Phuong are nowhere near as typically romantic as Pyle’s, they are still honest and true. 

Morality also too creeps into the mix, playing especially with the idea that no one can ever be mutual the entire time. Whether it be in war, love, friendship, whatever, at some point everyone has to take a side or become involved and this is what happens to Fowler through the catalyst of Pyle. Pyle’s character works as this great driving force within the narrative to push the otherwise neutral and stationary Fowler forwards, backwards, and sideways and this is how the story gains its depth and complexity. What’s most enthralling about the whole thing is that you don’t even know it’s happening until Fowler makes such an un-Fowler move and you realise then and only then what is going on. The whole thing is written from Fowler’s point of view, in Fowler’s cynical voice and there is a lot of free indirect speech that elevates him off the page and shapes him into this tangible 3-dimensional character. Whilst he’s a hard man to agree or side with, his transformation as a character is compelling and the way that Greene chronicles the chain of events that lead to a tragic and actually shocking outcome, is just SO good because, by the last page, you’re just staring at the book in front of you with it’s ‘happy ending’ and going “……” Seriously, there are no words to describe how I felt at the end of this book. 

Filled with action, violence, bloodshed, shocking images of war, romance, and even a little comedy in the voice of the narrator, The Quiet American is a great read and an incredibly deceptively complex book. It’s a bit like a soup where you can’t tell all the ingredients: it looks really simple, but then you get hits from all these different flavours that work in harmony to spark life into the pallet and that’s what this book does. It excites, it shocks, and it makes you go back and look closer to understand why and how Greene has made you feel the way you do in the end. 

The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories

Written by Henry James, this collection of four morbid and spectral stories proves to be a captivating, but at the same time challenging read. Dealing with a lot of taboo themes, the biggest being the corruption of children and innocence, which cinephiles would probably hold akin to the effect of the first Exorcist movie back in the day, it’s thrilling, chilling, and sometimes funny, but it’s definitely not a light read and sometimes it does pose a challenge in terms of a reading experience. 

Sir Edmund Orme – A young man begins to hold strong affections for a young lady, but is soon to discover that the ghost of a man that her mother had wronged haunts the lady. 

Owen Wingrave – When young Owen Wingrave, a natural born soldier from a family with a strong military history, decides to give up on the service, his tutor, best friend, and domineering Aunt and grandfather host an intervention at their ‘creepy’ family home where, legend says, one of the rooms is haunted. 

Friends of Friends – A woman determines that two of her friends should meet at they have both seen visions of people within the hour of death: she her father, he his mother. A series of timing accidents and misadventures prevent them for several years from ever meeting and when finally they do, it is under circumstances most peculiar as one of them is dead. 

The Turn of the Screw – A young, inexperienced governess takes the job of caring for young Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country home. Shortly after her arrival, the governess sees the figure of an unknown man lurking around the house. When she describes him to the housemaid, she discovers that the figure is Peter Quint, the master’s old valet, and he has come for little Miles. What complicates the matter is that Peter Quint is dead. 

Obviously the collection of these stories shares a common theme of ghosts, hauntings, and the deceased, but not all of them are quite so black and white as that. The Turn of the Screw, written in first person narration and playing (a little like Poe) with the theme of the unreliable narrator, is possibly one of James’ most controversial and confusing books because, at the end of the day, we don’t actually know whether the children are being designed upon by ghosts or if the governess herself is psychologically unwell. The unreliable narrator device is used to great effect here in that our heroine and narrator reads as being completely sane and rational, but then a spanner is thrown into the works when the housemaid as well as the children inform her (and the reader) that they cannot see what she is seeing. The thrills and suspense is wonderfully built up, in all the stories actually, making this book quite the page-turner once you get over the complexity of the writing. 

I found James’ style of writing to be very challenging. His sentences are very long, convoluted, and feature a multitude of commas and hyphens, which just make them all even longer (a little bit like Jane Austen, but harder to keep track of what’s happening). It took a while for me to settle into the flow of the writing, but once I did I enjoyed turning each page. 

Filled with drama, death, horror, hauntings, romance, comedy, and suspense, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories is a compelling book and quite the gothic experience. Whilst I found it challenging, I also revelled in and enjoyed the challenge of the James reading experience. 

Gone Girl

Written by Gillian Flynn and now made into a major film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl is the truly twisted and undeniably addictive, sinister romantic thriller that has you turning pages like there’s no tomorrow. Whilst it’s a thriller not up to the lofty standards of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, it definitely ascends the same ladder, just a few rungs behind, and sits as a truly twisted, thrilling, and addictive reading experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it! 

The morning of Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary begins like any other; that is until Nick returns for reading at the beach to discover his living room a shambles and his wife missing. Nick is the prime suspect and a strong case builds against him when Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, her own diary claims this as well, and that she kept secrets from him. Nick swears none of this is true, that something is amiss, but then a police examination of his computer reveals some strange searches. He swears he didn’t make them. His credit card records show some very large purchases. Not done by him. As the noose tightens around Nick, only one person can save him. So where is Amy? 

I have to admit that my reading experience would have been affected because I actually saw the film first. Normally, I’m a big advocate of reading the book before I see the flick, but in the case of Gone Girl I was at the movies with 4 hours to kill and it seemed like the only movie worth watching. It’s funny how fascinations can start like that. I can say that the film is a close adaptation of the novel, practically spot on! It’s a book that’s a little bit hard to get into at first. 

Written in the first person past tense, the characters retelling the story to us first-hand, it’s a bit hard to get into at first because it is a real he-said she-said king of thing and because the writing is nothing overly marvellous in terms of literary excellence, sometimes it’s quite everyday and generic, it gives the illusion that nothing is actually happening and the book is not that interesting. However, once you’re onto, I don’t know, page 50, you find that you can’t help from just continually reading on and on and on. What causes this? 

What this story ultimately is is quite possibly the greatest character study! Whilst the events of the plot are thrilling and inspire you to say out loud “that’s SO twisted!”, what Gone Girl is really about is the ability of people to change and, more so, their ability to change others. The seminal questions asked are “who are you?” and “what have we done to each other?” and the book works on these questions, moulding them into themes that string up this chain of intense cat-and-mouse play. What’s particularly brilliant is how the simplicity and the everyday voice that both Nick and Amy have as they tell their stories turns them into real 3-dimensional people, they could be your very own neighbours, because the realness of the writing makes Nick and Amy all the more intricate and really animates them into more than characters on a page. The personal register of the first person really rounds this out and their open addresses to the reader, a somewhat metafictive trick that comments on the books status as a story, cements Amy and Nick as people, not characters. It’s really quite wonderful! 

Filled with suspense, drama, misinterpretations, narrative misdirection, and ironically enough a really different kind of romance, Gone Girl is an absolutely brilliant book that’s very addictive. It’s sinister, it’s unbelievable, and what makes it so much so is the fact that the characters are elevated by the writing to the status of real people, which contrasts starkly with the horrible things they do over the span of over 400 pages! This is a book you feel you can, but really can’t put down. It’s great!

1984

Hailed as George Orwell’s most iconic literary masterpiece, his magnum opus, his tour de force, etc… 1984 is an astonishing and beautifully crafted political thriller that warns readers of the dangers of oppressive authorities, totalitarian societies, and how the struggle and desire for power, adopted as a soul driving force, can lead to the inevitable ruin of humanity. Drenched in drama, hope, and horror, this book has provided building blocks that act as the foundation for various other pieces of popular culture e.g. the show Big Brother and the psychological horror found in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Funnily enough, as this book was first published in 1949, it holds more relevance to today’s society and will probably proceed to accumulate more and more as the world gets older. It’s a bit scary. 

Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One, Oceania: a world that is governed by the Party and ruled by Big Brother. The face of Big Brother watches him from every poster, his every move at work and at home is monitored by telescreens, and the Thought Police uncover and administer justice on every little act of betrayal. Although seeming to conform to the Party, Winston hates it: he hates Big Brother and he hates the world in which he lives in where the past is alterable, a person can be vaporised completely out of existence, children are taught to monitor their parents for signs of betrayal, and above all there is nowhere to hide. As Winston’s questioning and hatred of the Party begin to grow stronger, he illegally purchases a diary in which to write his thoughts. After this act of betrayal, he finds love with a woman named Julia, another on-the-surface conformist who rebels against the Party by committing the smallest acts of betrayal. The two are quickly drawn to deeper conspiracy: joining the underground Brotherhood that determines to topple the Party and return to politics as they were before the Rebellion. But Big Brother does not tolerate dissent, even in the mind, and for people like Winston and Julia with original thoughts, they created the horrifying Room 101. 

There are so many brilliant ideas about life, politics, the mind, and everything in this book! Orwell takes the totalitarian society a frightening step further by introducing the ideas that originality and humanity is oppressed definitely through the restructuring and brutal simplifying of language, the eradication of the sexual intercourse urge, and the abolishment of the compassion and relationships between children and parents, man and woman, and friends. 

As well as being a frightening political thriller on the surface, 1984 has this subtle psychological thriller plotline running parallel as well as a very original and inspiring love story that provides the reader with the hope they need to get them through the rest of the book. The story of Winston and Julia and the hope that there will be a rebellion and they will make it together is what compels the reader to keep turning the pages. 

What is particularly engaging and ultimately fascinating about this book is the foundation on which it’s built. Orwell, in establishing the political and behavioural environment of the story employs Michel Foucault’s theory of Panopticism, based on Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 architectural prison design. For those who don’t know, the prison or Panopticon was designed a bit like an amphitheatre, with closed, individual cells, and a guard tower bang in the middle so as to see all the inmates. Foucault’s power theory regarding this design was that the inmates’ behaviour was affected positively: because they never knew when they were being watched and could not see or converse with other inmates, they were well behaved from dusk to dawn. Orwell employs that theory of Panopticism: the self-policing of humans, through the advent of the constant surveillance provided by the telescreens. When it was first published, this idea that television would dominate households just a generation into the future was absolutely terrifying. Orwell’s startlingly modern ideas about technology, politics, and the human mind proceed to harbour more and more relevance and canonicity as the work and the world gets older. It’s really rather astonishing. 

Amidst the political horror, the doomed romance, and the tragic hero story, Orwell treats readers to a healthy dose of dark humour and irony in the form of the four Ministries that govern the world as well as the contradicting slogans that are consistently reverted back to throughout. The Ministry of Peace perpetuates war, the Ministry of Plenty creates starvation, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for the fabrication and alteration of historical documents, and the Ministry of Love is where traitors are taken to be tortured, broken, and vaporised. 

Filled with violence, drama, politics, oppression, history, romance, and horror, 1984 is an iconic piece of literature that just exudes brilliance and cannot be missed out on. It’s one of the most celebrated politically charged thrillers in existence and I highly recommend that you read it. 

WAR IS PEACE 

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Rebecca

Written by Daphne du Maurier and revitalised over and over again in copycat novels, series, stage shows, and even a film by Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca is a darkly and delightfully intimate tale of jealousy, insecurity, romance, and influences from beyond the grave. I’ll admit that you do have to persevere with it because for about 200 pages, nothing all that interesting happens, but once you get to the very meat of the story it proves to be a juicy and succulent read.

The wealthy and mysterious Maximilian de Winter saves a shy and young woman from her life as the paid companion of a ghastly European woman by the offer of marriage. In Monte Carlo the young bride is in bliss, but when the newlyweds arrive at the ancient mansion that is Manderlay and home of Mr. de Winter, her happiness is drained away like water through a sieve. The house, the staff, and indeed Maxim are all oppressed and haunted by the memory of his first wife, Rebecca, who drowned one year ago. With the sinister housemaid Mrs. Danvers keeping Rebecca’s memory alive, Maxim’s new bride faces emotional horrors that she could never have imagined.

Rebecca I think has a great canonicity because it is a work that can not only be adapted and modernised, but even in its entirety it holds appeal to a multitude of readers with no generational divide. Daphne de Maurier’s blending of genres as well as a few other clever little ploys and reflections of Jane Eyre make Rebecca a work that stands out from other gothic novels and romances. For a start, there is wonderful cleverness and irony in our central character of Maxim’s shy young bride. The story is told in the first person register from her point of view, which makes the tale very intimate because the reader is treated to the deepest workings of the narrator’s mind and heart. We feel what she feels and we see what she sees. Although the first person focalisation can sometimes blind readers to the happenings of the book because they are limited in their scope, du Maurier’s largely intimate and sometimes fantasy-esque account of events from the view of the young bride provides the work with its substance as well as all the emotional drama and terror.
By the same token, the first person register used in Rebecca not only makes the story more intimately indulgent; it also brings a little comedy into the mix. The fact that the bride is never provided with a name is a huge and delicious serving of irony as the reader becomes to intimately knowledgeable of this character and blithely follow her and root for her to prevail and for all this we don’t even learn her name: the first basis on which to start a relationship. du Maurier’s ambiguity in this respect sets the ball rolling along one path and then brings about the real shock value when the true horror of the story begins to unfold. At this point, you don’t want to put the book down.
The mismatched blend of characters that somehow all work harmoniously together is also something worth noting. Our bride and heroine is this sweet, unrefined, and shy young thing, completely unsuited to the upstanding form and routines of Manderlay. We than have Maxim who, for the majority of the book, is a blend of sternness and vacancy showing affection to his wife as though she were a dog or a child, only to have true romantic passion burst forth when the truth becomes known in the climax. Mrs. Danvers the housemaid is the sinister, skulking character that you don’t like right from the off, however she ends up being the most tragic of all the characters (though this is only really shown in Hitchcock’s 1940 film). Frank Crawley is a fine, upstanding, and loyal gentleman and then on the other end of the spectrum we have Favell, Rebecca’s cousin, who is sleazy, mischievous, but somehow charming (George Sanders played him in the film was superb).
Filled with romance, drama, haunting, and a little bit of horror, Rebecca is a beautifully crafted book that is well worth the wait and perseverance. Like, The Shining, once you get to the meat of the story, you won’t want to put it down. 

Four Past Midnight

At midnight comes the point of balance. Of danger. The instant of utter stillness when between two beats of the heart, an alternate reality can slip through, like a blade between the ribs, and switch you into a new and terrifying world. 

Written by Stephen King, Four Past Midnight is a collection of four novellas that each explores the fragility of the human mind and how everything can change in that split second. The book is a delightful mixture of terrors on numerous fronts. 

Our first tale, The Langoliers, tells the story of ten passengers on board a plane that wake up to find the plane mysteriously empty of its pilot, cabin crew, and all the other passengers. The motley crew of travellers then proceed to discover with increasing horror that they have slipped through a crack in time and must get back to the present before they become the past. 

A surprising science fiction thriller, this story is one where King plays to the readers’ most primal of senses: curiosity. The writing is a little all-over-the-place and pockmarked with King’s undeniable and sometimes infuriating frankness and brutality and, to be honest nothing hugely engaging happens for the most part, but for whatever reason, be it the love for the writer or the unyielding niggle that says that something really good is going to happen, you continue to power through the book at three times the speed of sound, avidly taking in everything on the page in front of you. 

Filled with action, madness, violence, science fiction, horror, and even romance, The Langoliers is a very interesting story that opens up a lot of doors in your mind about the fragility of time; so much so that it can even be argued that it redefines what it means to time travel. It definitely throws the whole concept into a whole new light. 

Our second story is Secret Window, Secret Garden and this story tells the grizzly and terrifying tale of Mort Rainey, a divorced writer who is thrown into a violent and horrifying spiral when a man comes to his doorstep and accuses him of stealing his story. Although Mort goes to great lengths to prove his innocence the accuser, named John Shooter, proves impossible to sway and things soon become terrifyingly dangerous as Shooter’s path to revenge becomes littered with blood and dead bodies. 

My whole reason for buying this entire book was because I was desperate to read this story after I saw the movie: Secret Window, which starred Johnny Depp and John Turturro. It’s a fantastic psychological thriller with appropriate levels of suspense and gore and, not since The Shining have I been that frightened when reading! Reading the climactic part at 4 in the morning and a dog suddenly barked down the road…. I jumped, almost tumbled right out of bed! 

King has an innate talent for writing scenarios that are happening in reality and in the characters’ mind simultaneously. The writing in Secret Window, Secret Garden greatly and very clearly imprints the images in the mind of the reader and, with the violent horror and gore of the story written very bluntly and simply, it repulses and shocks you just enough to make you want to read on instead of putting the book down with a grimace and a flip of the stomach. The entire story is an intrinsic web of misdirection and deception and, filled with violence, murder, gore, and heaps of horror and suspense, it’s a story that you won’t want to put down! 

Our third story is The Library Policeman, which tells the traumatic tale of Sam Peebles, a real-estate agent who is roped into doing a speech for the Rotary Club. To liven up his speech Sam goes down to the local library, a feat in itself as he has a fear of libraries that stems from a long time ago, and here he meets Ardelia Lortz the librarian… and his troubles begin. There is something strange about Ardelia, even more so when Sam discovers that the woman has been dead for years. Yet she soon begins to start hounding Sam to return his library books, threatening him with the “Library Policeman”. Sam begins to panic when the books go missing and true terror takes hold when the dark, shadowy and menacing Library Policeman comes to his house… 

I found this story rather hard to get through as it takes an inordinate amount of twists and turns, not just of the plot, but of the genre of story as well. It begins as a sort of ghost story with Sam entering a ghost library and being served by a woman who, according to the rest of the word, died years ago. But then it escalates into a sort of alien story with Ardelia being some sort of otherworldly vampiric monster. And then finally it takes a detour down the thriller lane with Sam’s own personal tale of childhood trauma. I found that, with so many changes to the story’s style, I kept getting lost and not having a clue as to what was going on. 

Having said that though, once we get into the more climactic part of the tale, the recounting part where everything finally gets explained to the reader, then it becomes a rollercoaster of terror and fright. This is also the first King story I’ve read that features a little bit of subtle humour, sort of like that used in The Seven Year Itch, in which Stephen King uses his own name amidst some of the great horror writers that Ardelia lists for Sam. 

What I also liked about this story was that it was one in which the author could easily convey messages about reading and the general power of stories, in the case of this book: fairytales. When you get down to brass tax, fairytales, the original and un-Disneyfied ones, are really scary and not really for children at all. They were originally written to scare children into being good and that purpose serves King’s monster-mistress in this story very, very well. 

Filled with childhood trauma, violence, horror, romance, comedy, and heaps of suspense, The Library Policeman is a strange, but ultimately very engaging story that takes some time to get into, but once you’re in, there’s no hope of getting out. 

And the fourth and final story in this collection is The Sun Dog, which I have to admit I didn’t understand at all. This story tells the tale of Kevin Delevan and a camera that his parents give him for his fifteenth birthday. At first he’s very excited, it’s just what he wanted, but then the camera proves to have a fault: it takes the same picture over and over again. As if this isn’t enough the picture it takes is of a mongrel dog and what makes it more disturbing is the fact that in every picture that’s taken, the dog appears to move, getting closer and closer. With the help of his father and a seedy town crackpot, Kevin initiates an investigation into the phenomena and discovers that the dog really is moving and has one thing in mind: to escape from the Polaroid world and kill him. 

I found this story to be boring and made up of nothing but suspense. What compels you to keep turning the pages is the built-in expectation that everything nonsensical and boring that happens in the beginning and middle is only leading up to a fantastically scary and brutal climax. Unfortunately, this is not the case for this story. I just found that I couldn’t understand what the horror was and, maybe this is just a fault on my side, but I just found this story to be boring and I only read it because I hate not finishing a book. 

Having said this, I must admit that I did enjoy the horror-dog theme that King goes on in this story. We see open references to Cujo and then The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I quite enjoyed. 

Overall, Four Past Midnight is a great collection of stories that each explores the fragility of the split second and the what-if possibilities of other worlds and the human mind. 

Filled with violence, horror, romance, and a few clever bouts of comic writing, I quite enjoyed it. I’d read some of those stories again.