Review of Niceville by Carsten Stroud

Title: Niceville
Author: Carsten Stroud
Published: 12 June 2012
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Genre: horror, mystery, crime
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 5/10

One day in the American town of Niceville, ten-year-old Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school. Literally disappears – a security camera shows him looking at something in a shop window, stepping back with his mouth opening in alarm, and then vanishing from sight as if someone were playing a cheap trick with the film. But as far as anyone can tell, there’s no hoax – the camera shows exactly what happened. Equally perplexing is that there’s no one to blame, and no explanation, except perhaps some intangible evil force within Niceville itself…

Then suddenly the novel seems to morph into a completely different story with multiple plot stands. A bank robbery leads to the brutal murder of several cops and a news team. One of the robbers is betrayed by his partners and narrowly escapes with a bullet in his back, but is rescued by a mysterious woman living on a plantation in the forest. An ex-FBI agent with some dirty secrets has to try to reclaim a very dangerous item that was stolen from his safe deposit box in the bank. He planning on selling it to the Chinese, and they won’t be very forgiving if he doesn’t deliver. An abusive husband and father wants to take revenge on the lawyer and judge who banned him from contact with his family. For now, he decides to practice and perfect his plan by ruining the lives of people with no connection to him.  A woman and a man both go missing from an old mansion in Niceville. Both are members of one of the town’s founding families.

Only the latter plot is directly related to the first part of the book where Rainey went missing. At times you could be forgiven for thinking that you’d somehow started reading a different novel. The only factors that seem to connect part two to the beginning are the location, the new disappearances, and a few common characters, notably Nick Kavanaugh, the investigating officer who led Rainey’s case, and his wife Kate, a family-practice lawyer.

At first this really bugged me. It’s like you’ve been tricked into reading a novel completely different from the one you expected and started reading. Attention is taken away from the unexplained supernatural aspects of Rainey’s disappearance and the focus is put on some very realist criminal activity. It’s a while before we get back to the most interesting stuff, and even then it’s only one aspect of a much more complex story.

Eventually though, everything seemed to be coming together as characters and storylines connect. I love novels and movies with multiple, interlinked plots, so I really enjoyed the middle bit of Niceville where the individual plot strands began to intertwine. It’s also where the book started to get really creepy (although that might also be because I read quite a lot of this in the middle of the night). Clearly, there is something wrong about Niceville. Most notably, the town “has logged one hundred and seventy-nine confirmed and completely random [stranger abductions] since records first started being kept back in 1928. This is a disappearance rate of, like, a little over two a year, [...] which is completely whacked.” A few cases were solved, but “[o]f the remaining one hundred and sixty- two people— men, women, sometimes kids—not a single trace has ever been found.”

Rainey Teague was the most recent case, at least until Delia Cotton and Gray Haggard disappear from Delia’s mansion. There are a lot of eerie details surrounding the disappearance: a beautiful but creepy girl in a green summer dress; antique mirrors reflecting things that aren’t there; a weird mark on the floor in the shape of a person; the way past horrors seem to be intruding on the present. It’s all got something to do with dark secrets of Niceville’s founding families, and some kind of primordial evil that lies hidden in the cold black waters of Crater Sink, a large circular sinkhole in the cliff that hangs over the town.

You might be wondering what this has to do with bank robbers, cop-killers and the other criminals in the novel, all of whom are clearly devoid of supernatural powers. The sad answer is, not much. Niceville feels like two loosely connected novels that should not have been forced into one. The bank robbery, the ex-FBI agent and the vindictive husband stories remain almost completely separate from the supernatural storyline featuring unexplained disappearances, family secrets, ancient evil and ghosts. The two halves aren’t even in the same genre – one is realist crime fiction, the other is horror. There are overlaps of course, but the strongest link between the two is formed when a character from the crime story becomes an important part of the horror plot. It’s also implied that these crimes are actually influenced by the ancient evil in Crater Sink. And that’s that.

Even worse is that, although the horror story is marketed as the main one, it’s woefully neglected. Too many questions are left unanswered. Too many otherworldly occurrences are hinted at and never described in full. The resolution seems far too easy and peaceful, while also having the effect of cutting the story short. It’s so unsatisfying. In the meantime, the bloody crime-novel plot mostly gets sorted out. It’s not that I disliked that part of the book, but it’s not the one I cared about most and, frankly, I think it could have been left out.

For my rating, I took into account the fact that I really enjoyed reading a large portion of the book, I found it wonderfully creepy at times, and Stroud managed to get me fully invested in most of his story. I just think he’d have done a better job writing two books instead of one.

Buy Niceville at The Book Depository

Up For Review: Niceville by Carsten Stroud

Niceville by Carsten Stroud (Alfred A. Knopf)

Marketing copy from NetGalley:

One fine spring day in Niceville, a young boy named Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school. Literally disappears–security camera footage captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing.

The search for the boy is led by ex-Special Forces veteran Nick Kavanaugh, now a detective with the local police and no stranger to lowlifes and their criminal hijinks. In the nightmare that follows Rainey’s disappearance, Nick and his wife, Kate, a family practice lawyer, find themselves drawn into a shadow world between life and death, where they will come face-to-face with an ancient malevolent power that lies beneath Niceville, darker and older than the mountain forest surrounding its source: a 1,000-foot-deep pit known as Crater Sink.

Niceville will be published on 12 June 2012 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday.

eShort Review of Edie Investigates by Nick Harkaway

Title: Edie Investigates
Author: Nick Harkaway
Published: 14 February 2012
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday
Genre: short story, mystery
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 7/10

Old Donny Caspian has been found dead, and Tom Rice, “recently appointed Under-Nobody in charge of sod all”, has been sent by his organisation to oversee the investigation with firm instructions that the death be attributed to natural causes. But the corpse is missing its head, and Tom cannot do as told. Is it possible that his true purpose in the investigation has been concealed from him? He goes to a little tea shop called The Copper kettle to await further instructions.

Also in The Copper Kettle, “locked in combat with tea apparently made out of sump water”, is Edie Banister, retired spy, now a single old lady trying to avoid falling into the single-old-lady stereotypes (although she’s not averse to using them when it suits her). Donny was a good friend and she’s in town to ensure that things are done right. If not, “[s]he would arrive, spot the hidden clue and read the scene in the light of her knowledge of the secret parts of Donny’s life, and pronounce gravely that these were matters to be dealt with at the highest level”. Edie imagines it will be “like a bit of a last bow, a sort of Edie Rides Again”. In the meantime, she sits in the tea shop, seeing herself “reflected in the mirror as a cake-eating, gossipy Old Lady Detective” and thinks back about her first days as a spy, when she met Donny.

When Tom comes in however, her attention is inexplicably drawn to him, and it’s in The Copper Kettle that both of them realise that there really is something suspicious going on.

This short story has a lot going for it in terms of writing – it’s funny, charming, and full of detail. So much detail in fact, that once or twice the story meanders into arguably unnecessary territory, but it worked for me, so no harm done. I highlighted quite a few passages that I found amusing, most of which were related to Edie, who I think is a fantastic character. I couldn’t help but worry about her – she is in her eighties, after all – but she’s defied expectations of being a weak little female since the start of her career and she continues to do so in retirement.

The downside is that this eShort is essentially a way of introducing Edie, who plays a major part in Harkaway’s novel, Angelmaker. As a result, Edie Investigates feels incomplete and the plot is decent at best, particularly since the it’s largely preoccupied with Edie’s past, and deals rather briefly with Tom and Donny Caspian’s death. This wasn’t too problematic though – the writing and characters were enough to keep me interested in this short read.

Included in the eShort is the first chapter of Angelmaker, introducing us to the main character Joe Spork, the son of an infamous London criminal. Joe hasn’t followed in his father’s footsteps but spends his quiet life repairing antique clocks. Edie is one of his clients, and he repairs a little clockwork toy for her. According to the novel’s blurb, the clockwork gadget turns out to be a 1950s doomsday device. Having triggered it, Joe finds himself and Edie on an insane adventure featuring “mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight” (Goodreads blurb).

Frankly, I didn’t need the first chapter of Angelmaker. I didn’t find it particularly intriguing, and like the eShort it’s got loads of tiny details, only this time they felt a bit more like hard work than quaint amusements. Edie Investigates was enough to get me interested enough in Edie to read a whole novel featuring her, and I already wanted to read Angelmaker thanks to a positive review and the rather enticing blurb. But hey, the first chapter’s there if you want it – read it, don’t read it. Edie Investigates is worth a look either way (you can buy it on Amazon) and I still think Angelmaker looks like a great book.