FINAL BOY

This is a horror novel set in a small Chesapeake town on a river where there’s a fishing and crab-catching community. We follow Madi Price, a woman whose life is not really working out. She’s doing fortune telling readings for cash (which are mostly cold-readings) and her teenage daughter has rekindled a relationship with her father Donny. Her daughter seems to have chosen to mostly live with Donny.

Into her life comes Henry, a crab catcher, who she dated in High School. Henry is haunted by a family tragedy – his son Skyler has been missing for five years and his wife killed herself. When she touches Henry’s hand, Madi gets visions that aren’t cold-reading and whilst they are hard to interpret she gets the idea that maybe she can help Henry find Skyler and help herself at the same time.

The first section of this book is an absolute joy – the author nails character, voice, setting, atmosphere and language, and I just felt completely safe (not in an ‘oh-this-isn’t-going-to-be-scary’ way, but safe as in, this person writes SO well that I’m just down for whatever happens here). I could have spent 1000 pages in the company of the characters and the world that is set up so quickly and apparently effortlessly.

Then it gets weird. And not bad weird. Just…

Okay, this is what came to my mind. You know that Twin Peaks is sort of a murder mystery in a small town – the sort of stuff you’d see in a film or book or TV show in quite a vanilla way, and then David Lynch comes along and just Lynches it all up and makes it unpredictable and dark and idiosyncratic. Now imagine that in a parallel universe, Twin Peaks is the ‘vanilla’ show and the David Lynch of that parallel universe takes Twin Peaks (vanilla) and Lynches it up. And what happens next is that in universe 3, the new Twin Peaks Squared is the ‘vanilla’ show, and David Lynch in universe 3 comes along and Lynches THAT up. And we just keep doing that.

So the original – small town, based around a river, two interesting leads, a mystery and a bit of supernatural (visions) is our vanilla show, and then what happens next is a Lynchification of that, and then a further Lynchification of THAT version and so on. And it is all written deftly and with charm and the characters keep being fascinating and behaving in ways that are crackers but make an internal logical sense with who they are and what they might do faced with something extraordinary. And you just end up with a final sequence of stuff and you look back and think – how the hell did we get HERE from those first fifty pages?

[Or like imagining I want to hold your hand morphing into Revolution Number 9 – and what on earth you might get if you took the differences between I want to hold your hand and Revolution Number 9, but applied them to Revolution Number 9 and just kept doing that]

There’s lots of stuff about love and loss, and longing, and grief and pain, and an awful lot of stuff about crabs and body-horror. What lengths might you go to for love or to stop a pain that’s just unbearable to contemplate.

It’s an absolutely wild ride. The main thing for me though was that throughout, Clay McLeod Chapman never loses sense of who his characters are and what their heart wants and is just completely in control of what from the outside could look like a jazz band falling down a spiral staircase but continuing to play ever weirder versions of the initial tune.

Can’t wait to see what he does next.