Content warnings: Probably all the things, but definitely dog murder. I DNF’ed this, so check Goodreads.
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same. In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead. That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
Sooo, I went into this book with high expectations for a fun (if almost certainly problematic) time, having read and enjoyed CJ Tudor’s most recent books, The Burning Girls and The Other People. I’d seen the Stephen King blurb that’s like, “If you like me, you’ll like her” (and, yes, I know, he’s a very problematic racist/sexist/ableist liberal…but my nostalgia goes hard for anything that captures his character-driven worlds and my mid-teens), and I could see the resemblance, particularly with The Other People. I didn’t realize that the comparison–and King’s own recommendation–were because she…like…literally mimicked his plots and style and character types early on.
Ugh, I am so damn disappointed. So, this book starts off with a split timeline and a group of childhood friends–four boys and the one, single, solitary “not like other girls” girl. Thanks, I hate it… Hello IT, my old friend, who I’ve fully broken up with, because the twenty years since I read it have meant a lot of growth and rethinking things, like token Black characters, gratuitous use of slurs, and consensual child gang bangs.
I could not abide the writing style or tone of this book. Its central dude narrator is so sexist and whiny and annoying (and, with his much-younger woman roommate in the current timeline, creepy). He and his friends are also prone to smarmy/folksy interjections that they say until you want to kill them (again, hello Mr. King…I had a lot more patience for this shit when I was 14.)
So, I closed the book and popped onto Goodreads. Oh great good god, the plot (granted, the convoluted narrative and the way so many characters end up responsible for violent/terrible things is very Tudor and a little less classic King, but it’s always hilarious to read thriller-horror plotlines wrapped up in 3 paragraphs). One quick mention: Tudor uses the tired, harmfully ableist trope of an albino person–the titular Chalk Man, aka the kids’ new teacher– being possibly evil, and certainly creepy. This book is only like 3 years old!! Why is this still a thing?? (If you want to read some great books centering albino people and the way they navigate prejudice but also just their everyday lives, check out Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanjujuist YA novel Akata Witch and its sequel Akata Warrior, and Rivers Solomon’s absolute barnburner of a fabulist tale, Sorrowland [though massive content warnings for the latter]).