There are certain terrors of childhood and adolescence that never quite lose their grip; for me, it’s stories like Candyman and It, tales of weirdly compelling figures of nightmare who trick children into their nets. Phoebe Locke’s The Tall Man (Wildfire, £12.99), which I found so chilling I had to put it aside for the few days I was home alone, draws on the more recent cult of Slender Man, an online urban legend that inspired two 12-year-old girls to attempt to murder a classmate in order to win the creature’s favour.
Told through a mix of perspectives and timelines, The Tall Man moves from 1990, when a young Sadie and her friends spiral into an obsession over the Tall Man (“He takes away the ones who are bad … but he’ll hurt the people who hurt his special ones, too”), to 2000, when Sadie has had a child and is talking to someone who isn’t there, to 2018, when her daughter, Amber, is the subject of a documentary. “The headlines chilled me: a senseless murder, a family haunted by one member’s demons. An urban legend which had sunk its claws into an innocent child and turned their life upside down,” says the film’s director. Genuinely scary, The Tall Man carefully walks the line between psychosis and the paranormal, never quite letting the reader know its truth.
The killer is a little less mysterious in Tara Isabella Burton’s spectacularly impressive debut Social Creature (Raven Books, £12.99). Louise is nearing 30, struggling to make ends meet in New York, struggling to enjoy life, to get things right. “Sometimes Louise considers going out with somebody new, but this seems like just another thing to potentially fuck up,” writes Burton, in her drily audacious prose. “Maybe the moon is full. Maybe the stars are bright. Maybe cigarettes smell like incense. But not for her, she thinks. Never for people like her, who don’t live on the Upper East Side, who don’t go to Yale, who aren’t even naturally blonde.”
Then Louise meets Lavinia, a whirlwind of eccentricity and pretentiousness and beauty and fun, and her life pops into Technicolor. Suddenly, she feels, she is experiencing New York as it should be experienced – the opera, the parties, the dresses, the selfies that Lavinia endlessly plasters across social media.
We know from the start – Burton makes us implicit in this crime – that it won’t last. “Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish their stories, when they are both great writers – both of them – to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste, where James Joyce used to live, to Vienna to see the paintings, to Carnevale,” she writes. “Lavinia will never go. She is going to die soon. You know this.” A ridiculously assured first novel, told in an utterly original voice that doesn’t waver – even when it tackles body disposal.
Mick Herron is justly acclaimed for his Jackson Lamb novels, about a corpulent failed spy and his cohorts at Slough House. This Is What Happened (John Murray, £12.99) is a different beast: a standalone, it shies away from the stinging humour that makes Herron’s Slough House books so appealing, to paint instead a spine-crawlingly creepy portrait of cruelty and of loneliness.
Set in a post-referendum Britain where the “dripdripdrip of sour resentment” from the men’s rights movement is growing, where “the nastiness unleashed had not yet gone back in its box”, we meet Maggie Barnes, Herron’s protagonist, as she crouches on a toilet in an office block at night, preparing to pull off a James Bond-esque feat of spookery. Herron moves back and forth in time to show how this very ordinary post office worker was recruited – “She wasn’t icy cool and she wasn’t super-hot. He’d plucked her from a crowd, and really, it would be sensible to let her subside back into it, and lose herself among the traffic” – springing twist after brilliant twist as he practically dares his reader to try to put the book down. I finished it at a gallop, sitting in the car while I willed my baby to stay asleep. Very impressive.
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