TL; W[on’t]R[ead the review]: VERY MUCH like Stephen King–it’s fun until it isn’t, and it’s white-liberal-racist to the core.
Content warnings: violence, murder [sometimes graphic descriptions], death of a child, attempted suicide and suicidal ideation, slight gory descriptions, brief threat of sexual assault [**My memory’s not great, so these are never comprehensive. I’d recommend searching other places for a fuller list.**]
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Driving home one night, stuck behind a rusty old car, Gabe sees a little girl’s face appear in the rear window. She mouths one word: ‘Daddy.’ It’s his five-year-old daughter, Izzy. He never sees her again. Three years later, Gabe spends his days and nights travelling up and down the motorway, searching for the car that took his daughter, refusing to give up hope, even though most people believe that Izzy is dead. Fran and her daughter, Alice, also put in a lot of miles on the motorway. Not searching. But running. Trying to keep one step ahead of the people who want to hurt them. Because Fran knows the truth. She knows what really happened to Gabe’s daughter. Then, the car that Gabe saw driving away that night is found, in a lake, with a body inside and Gabe is forced to confront events, not just from the night his daughter disappeared, but from far deeper in his past. His search leads him to a group called The Other People. If you have lost a loved one, The Other People want to help. Because they know what loss is like. They know what pain is like. They know what death is like. There’s just one problem . . . they want other people to know it too.
Ohhhh boy, this book. This was my second CJ Tudor book, after blitzing through her most recent novel, The Burning Girls, and I had high hopes. For awhile, they were (mostly) met, and Tudor got me invested enough in the main characters and plot to really care where everything and everyone was going, and whether they’d end up ok. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that all fell apart by the end, but this is a thriller (and this is me reading a thriller), so of course it did. Silly, unsatisfying endings aren’t what’s wrong with this book, really (though the hints at the fantastical throughout the novel are truly anticlimactic.)
What’s wrong with this book is that Tudor shares a very particular weakness with her clear inspiration, Stephen King, whose blanket blurb on her work (“If you like my stuff, you’ll like this”) holds truer than he might have meant. Namely, Tudor CANNOT write characters of color (in this case, Black characters) without steering determinedly into highly problematic (read: racist) tokenized and/or villainized territory. This was shockingly the case in The Burning Girls, and it’s the case in a different-but-still-way-too-similar way here with the mysterious and never-named Samaritan.
Holy god, this character. For the majority of the novel, he crops up at random opportune moments, magically guiding the main character Gabe forward in his search for his missing-and-presumed dead daughter Izzy. He knows way more than Gabe, way more than the reader, and seemingly way more than anyone else in the novel. He’s also (other than his barely-appearing son) the ONLY non-white character in the novel, as far as I could tell.
And he’s introduced and repeatedly re-introduced via his dark clothes (ok) and dark skin (less ok): “The Samaritan was tall. And thin. As always, he was dressed in black. Black jeans, long black jacket. His skin was almost as dark. His shaved skull glinted in the moonlight. His teeth were a startling white…” And at the end of the book, the same damn phrase is used to describe his skin color: “He wore black: overcoat, T-shirt and jeans. His skin was almost as dark.” Not only is that sloppy, it’s reductive and problematic as hell. But Tudor continues on in case there was any [white] doubt of her unintentional racism: “Sitting, still, in the corner, he was little more than a shadow. A shadow that most patrons gave a quick glance then chose a seat far away from. Nothing to do with race or prejudice. More a sense of unease. A feeling that if they looked at the man for too long, they might see something they could never erase. [bold mine]” You mean to tell me this dark-skinned Black man is being avoided by all (presumably white) customers, and it’s ok, it has nothing to do with racism, it’s because he EXUDES BAD VIBES THAT MAKE OTHER PEOPLE UNCOMFORTABLE.
A. of all, that’s just a description of what racial prejudice IS, and B. of all) THAT DOES NOT MAKE THE RACIAL REPRESENTATION BETTER. Making your ONE Black character a source of infinite “unease” for your nice, “normal” (white) patrons isn’t doing the work you seem to think it’s doing. It’s doing the opposite work!! It’s doing the work that you can’t seem to help but do.
Ok, so. To recap: the Samaritan is a magical Black man who has no real name and shows up and guides nice old Gabe, and what we mostly know about him is that he wears black and also IS Black, and is very dark-skinned, and we need to be reminded of these basic facts repeatedly (for some unknown reason that’s not ham-fistedly racist). That sounds very Stephen King, circa The Shining, god help us, and even Dick Hallorann had a name. But then this character is, unlike Hallorann, vaguely menacing, or creepy, or something, because reasons. And those reasons, unsurprisingly, get massively into
SPOILER TERRITORY
See, the thing is, we DO get another name for the Samaritan (not a real name, mind you)–the Sandman. It turns out, the Samaritan/Sandman is one of the big bads of the novel, the man who’s been pursuing the “Other People,” a shadowy “dark web”(ugh)-based group who operate a quid-pro-quo revenge/murder service for grief-stricken people. It’s a bit complicated, but basically the Samaritan has been using Gabe to find Fran, one of the novel’s other point-of-view characters, who fled the Other People when her role in murdering Gabe’s wife and child went awry and she kidnapped Gabe’s daughter Izzy (re-christened Alice). See, it turns out that Fran was being blackmailed into helping with the murder because she had ordered a hit on the man who killed her father years before in a smash-and-grab car jacking.
But then IT TURNS OUT, the man Fran ordered the hit on WAS THE SAMARITAN’S SON (I said he wasn’t technically the only Black character in the novel…), and the Samaritan has been out for revenge, outside of the apparatus of the Other People’s network, ever since. So he uses Gabe, who’s trying to find his daughter Izzy, to track down Fran (how he is all-knowing and sees all the links between these characters is explained, albeit unconvincingly) and attempt to kill her, which he does around the mid-point of the novel.
(Oh and by the way, Gabe’s family is on the hit-list to begin with because as a teen he drunk-drove into a teen heiress, Isabella, and rendered her braindead, but the heiress’s mom helped him escape jail time by making him visit Isabella weekly for the rest of his life. And then the mom had him inherit the entire estate after her death for some twisted reason, and this is relevant because Isabella’s caretaker is out for vengeance so she can inherit the fortune and pull the plug on her charge….Are you keeping up?)
By the end, Gabe manages to figure some of this out, and he confronts the Sandman about his murderous role in the whole plot. The following (truly staggering) interchange occurs:
S: “He was my boy. And he was only eighteen when that bitch had him killed. He wasn’t a bad kid. I know what he did was wrong. But he had a lot of good inside him, too.”
G: “He killed a man and went to a party.”
S: “And you ran over a girl when you were drunk and left her brain dead. And yet here you are. You, with your white privilege, get a second chance….Oh I know you were poor. But white poor ain’t the same as black poor, and don’t try and say it is. The white trash who almost kills a girl drunk-driving gets a suspended sentence. A black kid, up for manslaughter–take a card and go straight to jail. Boom.”
Boom.
So, like, yes, CJ Tudor, OBVIOUSLY white privilege actually IS a huge problem, but it IS NOT THE PROBLEM HERE, and I think you know that, but I think you also wanted to ham-fistedly try to perform some twisted version of “woke” culture. A few things: the Samaritan is talking here about his son Jayden’s unjust chances in a court of law, as compared to Gabe’s unfair advantage as a teen. But what actually HAPPENED was that Jayden was extra-judicially murdered by the Other People, at Fran’s behest. That…has nothing to do with the court system, fucked up as it is. So it makes the Samaritan–and the invocation of white privilege here–seem irrational and almost unhinged. Also, Gabe (stupid as he is) is one of our main POV characters–he’s fairly sympathetic, he’s a widower, and he’s been devoting his whole life to getting his daughter back, even when everyone else thinks she’s dead. That’s a steeply stacked deck in favor of the character arguing against white privilege, which further undermines the Samaritan’s point. (Relatedly, we witness Gabe’s teen crime in a flashback–he is horrified, he stays with the victim, and he turns himself in. The Samaritan’s son is never granted POV status, and he seems to cavalierly smoosh Fran’s father between his car and a wall and run off to a party [which was pretty wild, but also not remotely sympathetic behavior]. Again, the deck is STACKED.) Judging from some Goodreads reviews, this stacked deck was all some white folks needed to take this bullshit argument against white privilege and run with it, which is a damn shame and a disservice to (I think) whatever Tudor thought she was doing. Or maybe I’m being too generous in thinking this outcome was unintentional. I don’t know. I do know that this ham-fisted shit is harmful, and it’s ridiculous, and it shouldn’t be here. The Samaritan, for all his faults as a thinly developed character, is meant to be smart and fascinating. Even he deserved better than this.
My other issues with this novel are more general and can be summed up more quickly. There’s a fantastical thread running through the plot that seems classically Stephen-King-esque (in the less problematic sense) and involves magically-precocious little girls, liminal spaces between worlds, beaches, and aggressive telepathy. Blending modern (ie., convoluted as fuck) thriller elements with speculative horror elements seemed like the formula for a great, unique book, but the horror elements petered out by the end. There IS a telekinetic confrontation scene, and the magical beach-between-worlds IS proven to be real (hell, even the Samaritan has a pearl from there–IMPLANTED IN HIS TOOTH [!!]), but it doesn’t really matter. It does save our main characters at a critical moment, but everything happens so quickly and so anticlimactically that it barely registers after so much buildup.
As for the “Other People”–the less said about them, the better. Some reviewers have compared them to the Illuminati, and they do seem to be a secret, incredibly powerful international group that operates in the shadows. Except, unlike the Illuminati, they’re real in this world, and they have Scotland Yard, the FBI, and seemingly every other nation’s crime bureau searching to take them down. And they operate via the “dark web,” which is explained in ways that are very, VERY cringey and laughably boomer.
The final, non-magical ‘twists’ in the book aren’t particularly satisfying either. Fran’s character comes back briefly in an “I’m not dead” fakeout, newly disguised in witness protection, only to explain a crucial plot hole that…turns out not to matter at all.
So the book ends with a whimper, not a bang.
Copaganda rating: Mixed (The cop on the Other People’s payroll, Steve, is an abusive, rapey monster, but main cop DI Maddock is a “good,” sympathetic cop, and her hunches are always smart and right. I guess that’s feminism? She does get to impart one of the most wildly ableist takes in the novel, narrating that her average day consists of working with “Druggies, alcoholics, [and] people with mental health issues who should be in a facility where they can be treated appropriately instead of left to wander the streets until they forget to take their medication, scalp someone with a machete…” Yikes.)
