Early in Paul Cornell’s psychological horror novel Chalk (Tor, £14.50), something appalling happens to Andrew Waggoner, a mild-mannered schoolboy who suffers continual bullying. After a Halloween disco he’s attacked by five fellow pupils who drag him into nearby woods, tie him to a tree and mutilate him. Later that night, his tortured psyche gives birth to a Hyde-like alter ego that proceeds to do terrible things; as he tells Andrew: “You can only be healed when your revenge is complete.” What follows, seen through the eyes of the book’s unreliable narrator, is the story of Waggoner’s revenge. The setting is the West Country in the 1980s, and Cornell brilliantly delineates not only the insular milieu of rural England but the brutal materialism of Thatcher’s Britain, in a slow-building novel of retribution and cycles of abuse. Cornell has described Chalk as not being about the triumph of a victimised martyr but about “how the bullied often become the bullies, and a desperate attempt to escape that”. Superb.
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2n2HWZt
0 comments:
Post a Comment