Reading the back cover of this book irritated me. The plot sounded like the novel It by Stephen King. Young kids find some criminal or supernatural activity. Later in life, they are called back to it only to finally uncover the real truth about what happened in their youth. One of the reviewers called it “an utterly original novel,” which only irritated me more. I have difficulty finding any original story with the number of books I read in various genres.
The story is about a rag-tag gang of kids (four boys and one girl). The narrator of the story is one of the boys. The kids have a game in which they leave secret messages for each other drawn in chalk. Then, they find chalk drawings that lead them to a dismembered body in the woods. The head of the murdered young woman is missing. The murder is never solved. Thirty years later, they begin to receive chalk drawings that will open up the entire mystery once again and, perhaps, lead to revealing the murderer.
The story alternates between 1986 when the children find the dead body, and 2016, when the chalk drawings appear again. I’m not particularly fond of this writing device, but it does work in creating suspense.
So, I began reading this book with a predisposed irritation and bias against it.
But then, the book caught ahold of me. I didn’t want to put it down after my allotted reading time. One afternoon, I blew off everything I was supposed to do to sit in my easy chair and finish reading it.
While this book has many twists and turns, I suspected what had happened to the head early on in the reading and was correct. However, I didn’t have any idea who had murdered the girl. Although somewhat surprising, the final reveal made sense with the story beats leading up to it.
The writing is beautiful: “The blue had been scoured from the sky by Brillo-gray clouds.” At one point, a character says, “…my life is one long wreck of ‘should haves’ crashing into each other in a big, tangled mess of regrets.” For a first novel, I would even call it brilliant. The characters are well-developed and engaging. The writing is crisp. The plot does not sag in the middle. The setting is well-drawn.
I had expected this to be a horror novel. However, it’s a ‘who done it’ and contains nothing scary. I was kind of disappointed with that.
On the horror rating scale, this rates a zero out of 5.
On the books to read, because they are entertaining, this book rates a 4 out of 5.