Book Review: "Whistle," by Linwood Barclay

     Linwood Barclay enters the world of supernatural horror with his new novel Whistle, but unfortunately it isn't the slam dunk I hoped it would be. While fast-paced and intermittently engaging, its best moments feel like pale imitations of its inspirations, most noticeably Stephen King's Needful Things, which is directly name checked. As one of King's "Constant Readers" and a massive horror fan, I'm very used to novels in the horror space trying to imitate his various works. There are flashes of successful homage here, but Barclay's book never separates itself from those attempts to provide anything new, and the mention of Needful Things frankly made me want to set this one down for a bit to read that instead.

    Whistle is a book with two lightly interlocking stories, one about children's book artist Annie and her son Charlie taking a break from New York City after a tragedy and the other about Harry, a small town sheriff in Vermont growing suspicious of the weird man running the new toy train store that has seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Both of these halves of the tale are given roughly equal time, but I couldn't help but feel as though the earlier set (just after 9/11) cop vs. mysterious stranger chunk should have been a small prologue instead of making up half the book. Much like the toy trains the strange new salesman Edwin Nabler is handing out to the town's denizens, this part of Barclay's novel stays on a track that runs from a generic point A to a predictable and unsatisfying point B. While it does explain some parts of the later set Annie and Charlie story, it is so light on character development on its own that the scares never delivered and the fates of various thinly-drawn townsfolk barely registered with me. 

    Annie, the children's book artist going through turbulent times, is the book's more interesting protagonist, and truthfully I wanted to know more of her past and the way it eventually ties into the strange events when her son Charlie finds a toy train set in the shed of their new rental home. We only get little flashes of her backstory before the death of her husband due to spending so much of the book on rails with the other half of the story. Charlie is definitely assembled in the general mold of a Stephen King-esque child, but oddly we never get any horror elements from his point of view and very little of his experiences with the supernatural events at hand. This, to me, is the book's weakest element and where it truly loses any hope of approaching King territory. King novels like the aforementioned Needful Things or Salem's Lot or Desperation always feel like they give if not equal time than at least equal detail to every character's experiences. Sure, it runs the page count up when every character gets this sort of attention, but it makes you care about what happens to them or at least intrigued as to what their eventual fate will be. In this novel, Linwood Barclay gives vague silhouettes of characters who head in a very easily sussed out straight line. 

    It's by no means a bad novel, and the pages often fly by. I found myself getting excited for the horror and supernatural moments, but ultimately they were underdeveloped and certainly under explained. The antagonist seems to have new powers a few times towards the end that would have been well-utilized earlier on. I wonder if there are much longer earlier drafts of this book and what those might look like. If the King vibe was truly Barclay's goal, a couple hundred extra pages would have helped, not hurt.

2.5/5

Book Review: "Something I Keep Upstairs," by J.D. Barker

 

    J.D. Barker's new mystery/thriller Something I Keep Upstairs is a fast and pleasant read, but one that I found ultimately lacked the focus necessary to elevate it to the next level. It's a story of a group of teenage friends who are spending time at one of their group's newly inherited island home where nothing is as it initially seems. The story's narrator is Billy (perhaps the least interesting of the group, but that I think was a smart decision to ground the tale), a relatively average kid who plays sports and is dating Kira. His best friend, Spivey, learns that his seldom-seen grandmother has passed and left him her estate. The island and the house on it are the stuff of legend; there are tales of discovered skeletons, an old coast guard station, and, most interestingly, the fact that sometimes the house seems to be much newer looking than it should be... or perhaps much older than you thought it was, depending on the character's perspective. 

    Spivey is the book's most compelling character. He's been dealing with leukemia off and on, he's not athletic like his best friend Billy, and he's not the most popular kid around. Having a secluded house away from everyone's parents and various other authority figures seems like a real blessing. But his late grandmother's attorney is always hanging around, and he keeps reminding Spivey that the house and island have a set of very specific rules. Those rules and their origins are the book's most intriguing mystery, of course, but the relatively lengthy novel unfortunately waits until vary late in the game to start dishing out answers, and at that point they come at a rapid clip that really diminishes the sense of joyous revelation that I tend to hope for in stories of this sort. 

    Another issue I found was that the book sidelined Spivey himself more and more in its back half, instead starting to focus on a relatively generic police chief and his investigation. There's a lackluster missing girl element in the mix that never feels as important as one assumes it was supposed to be, giving off major red herring vibes from the moment the concept is introduced. It's clear why Spivey is sidelined in favor of two of the other kids (Alesia and Matty, who have their own ideas for what to do with the island and its secrets) when the book's final outpouring of answers begins, but it lessened the impact of what J.D. Barker was trying to accomplish. There's a handful of twists that aren't effective because the groundwork to set them up was either too rarely implied or was handed out mere pages before the reveal. 

    That being said, Barker's a strong writer, and the pages fly by. There's a bit of an over-reliance on teenage love pains that don't quite ring true, but the suspenseful and more action packed elements and scarier chapters are handled very well. I found myself doing the classic "just one more chapter" routine throughout my time with the book, which should tell you that despite my complaints there's still a lot to recommend. While I personally think another few drafts could have shortened and shaped this into something stronger, I still would recommend any horror and mystery fans give it a shot.

 
3.5/5