Book Review of The Rule by David Jackson

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Cheerfully mixing the gritty daily realities of life in a dilapidated block of council flats with (hopefully improbable) extreme violence, this is a story of a very gentle man trying to do the right thing by his SEN son and his wife in a grim situation made increasingly impossible by those whose concept of right and wrong is shaped by their own whim first and their own interests second, with the rest of the world nowhere except in the way.

Although the hero sometimes contributes to his own misfortunes by being awesomely naive, there is no situation so bad that the psychopaths who have intruded into his life cannot make it worse. For most of the novel the tension lies in the reader wondering how long the author can go on turning the screw and when relief comes it redefines salvation as something which, before you read the book, would seem like catastrophe. 

 

The Rule by David Jackson is published by Viper (Profile Books) on the 1^st of July 2021