Book Review of The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill

* * * * *

A rich crime thriller.

When Vintage Books invited me to read and review Susan Hill’s latest novel in this series, they recommended that I read this, the opening novel in the series, first. Having read it, I shall now review it, even though an awful lot of other people will have done so before me.

Set in a fictional rural corner of England, as if Ely or St Edmunds Bury Cathedral was near both Glastonbury and the housing estates of Stevenage or Houghton Regis, this opening novel in the “Simon Serrailler” series revolves around that character at a distance and the Detective Chief Inspector is seen mostly through the eyes of his General Practitioner sister and his new Detective Sergeant, Freya Graffham. In this story it is not just the criminals who are elusive, so are the crimes. The local drug dealers are proving difficult to even identify, let alone pin down, as is a gang stealing newly-delivered white goods. So when apparently-unconnected individuals disappear without trace, it’s hard for Freya Graffham to even be sure herself that she’s investigating a crime worthy of her precious time: convincing her immediate superior is beyond her and even DCI Serrailler only concedes that there “might” be something in the disappearances.

All of the missing, however, are missed by someone and the pain of these tragedies is well depicted.

As is the joy which Freya Graffham finds in her new life, away from London and her controlling ex-husband in a new community, where she can sing in the cathedral choir and make her own choices again. Matters of the spirit and alternative medicine are addressed at several levels and in varying shades of light and dark. The ending has a lot of impact, but is not completely dark.

The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill is published in the UK by Vintage, 1^st of February 2010

Book Review of: The Memory Wood by Sam Lloyd

At first when you read this book, it seems as if Sam Lloyd has started off in the same place as John Fowles did with “The Collector”. But he goes in a different direction and through a different set of dangers to arrive in a different nightmare. This makes for a gripping read, if a disturbing one.

Fowles was inspired to write “The Collector” when he connected his literary studies, which revealed that a “girl being held captive in a cellar” was a common folk tale all over Europe, with a real case post WW2, where a boy had kept a girl captive in an air-raid shelter. He realised that this was not a myth, “urban” or otherwise, but something that really happened, quite widely and perhaps quite often. Since The Collector was published in 1963, there has been a steady stream of real-life cases bearing out Fowles’ observation, but not all of them have involved a psychotic individual culprit. Some, from Australia and latterly the Netherlands, seem to involve sub-cultures; some family-based or family-sized, others somewhat larger; cults if you like. You get a long way into The Memory Wood before you realise that it is about a sub-culture which in turn revolves around an individual and by the time you know which of the characters this actually is, you’ve almost reached the end. This book grips you, not just to thrill and entertain, but to teach you that sub-cultures can be at least as dangerous as the “lone psycho” that our popular culture leads us to fear more.

Along the way you also learn that lost souls will go where they are led, until something or someone intervenes and they go towards the light, sometimes with the very last of their strength.

Matthew K. Spencer 2^nd of November 2019.

The Memory Wood is published by Random House. 

Available from:

Waterstones

Amazon.co.uk