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

Book Review of The Resident by David Jackson

This is a compelling tale of Thomas Brogan, a self-described “serial killer” who is, technically speaking, more of a spree killer. Despite the somewhat nightmarish content, it is strangely easy to read, which is a bit disturbing in itself.

The main plot device is a row of terraced houses with interconnecting loft spaces, and this works very well and is quite plausible, because I can remember a junior school classmate who exploited just such a situation to commit his own little crime spree: in that case, the long row of 1960s terraced houses had a communal loft space which gave access to the tops of stud walls all the way along. My classmate exploited this situation to steal all sorts of things from all sorts of places, and hide them by tying bits of string to each valuable item and hanging them down inside the stud walls, where even police searches of the loft failed to find them. The masterplan was ruined, however, when one of the stolen items proved to be an alarm clock, which my classmate neglected to disarm before lowering it into its hiding place.

These communal loft spaces predictably turned out to be a lethal fire risk, however, especially in more modern terraces with stud walls as described above, and local councils made efforts to get them all fire-walled in the seventies and eighties. So it is also quite plausible that such a loft-space would be partitioned in the course of the story. I am not sure if any still exist in England, in fact: they may do, but they shouldn’t, for reasons that have nothing to do with serial killers.

The story is narrated largely by Brogan arguing with a voice in his own head, which lays the back story out nicely.

However, the one fault with this novel is that the author allows himself to fall into the trap of thinking that the back story of a serial killer has to include a real-life horror scene of some kind, for them to want to inflict similar horrors on others. This isn’t necessarily true. Often, the actual triggers are so banal that investigators think they must have missed something more significant. The biggest risk is not a horror scene in early childhood: young children undoubtedly suffer from such experiences, but without being turned into monsters. What creates the monsters is instability at home affecting male children between nine and eleven years old, or children in that age range being subjected to unremedied bullying in any setting. The lack of remedy or resolution matters, and the absence of a stable, preferably loving, relationship with a male parent or authority figure. This is not meant to be an attack on single Mums, it is an observation that absent or abusive fathers or carers can create threats to society as a whole. The author gets this bit pretty much right, but only after he’s put in the seemingly obligatory nightmare scene in early childhood, which confuses the issue.

There is a good surprise ending to the book. 

The Resident by David Jackson is published by Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books on 16/7/2020