Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Joe never wanted to come back to Arnhill. After the way things ended with his old gang—the betrayal, the suicide—and what happened when his sister went missing, the last thing he wanted to do was return to his hometown. But Joe doesn’t have a choice, not after a chilling email surfaces in his inbox: I know what happened to your sister. It’s happening again . . . Lying his way into a teaching job at his former high school is the easy part. Facing off with onetime friends who aren’t too happy to have him back in town—while avoiding the enemies he’s made in the years since—is tougher. But the hardest part of all will be returning to the abandoned mine where his life changed forever, and finally confronting the horrifying truth about Arnhill, his sister, and himself. Because for Joe, the worst moment of his life wasn’t the day his sister went missing. It was the day she came back.
Because my expectations for The Chalk Man were demolished within the first 50 pages, I was leery of this novel (which I tried to start reading the same night after my first Tudor DNF) from jump. The gory opening chapter didn’t do overmuch to dispel my worries, and I found myself closing this one and jumping onto Goodreads for spoilers after only 20 pages.
I just…again, we have a boring dude narrator who’s unappealing and…not nice. The whole damn setting and tone were bleak as fuck, and I definitely don’t read thrillers OR horror for bleak shit. I want cozy small towns that get ripped apart (sometimes literally). I want rich idiots doing dumb things and then running for their lives. I want sweet friends banding together to fight. Tudor’s most recent 2 books have bleak elements, for sure, but her tone there is VERY different, at least in my opinion, and her writing style is so much more assured and immersive. (I think it doesn’t hurt that she switched from focusing solely on depressed-sulky-dudes as POV characters.)
SPOILER TERRITORY
Here, as with The Chalk Man, Tudor’s still ‘doing’ Stephen King in some ways, but prime King was rarely this bleak. However, as reviewers on Goodreads have amply discussed, the comp for this book is arguably King’s most bleak (and embittered?) earlier novel, Pet Sematary, one of the very few pre-2000s King books I never read as a teen (due mostly to the mass animal death, though he does kill off a pet in almost all of his books, so I’m not entirely sure why that stopped me there). I know the story, and I’ve fast-forwarded through the original movie, so I get the premise.
It’s a very overdone premise.
I appreciate that Tudor changed the setting from the racist cliched Native burial ground to an old mine (though, in the UK, it’s not like she could’ve kept that), and I like the addition of other magic, but she needed to find her own narratives to follow (which, I think, she mostly did for the more recent books, much as they have their problems).