FINAL BOY

This is a novel in a genre that’s sort of horror, sort of thriller, sort of literary fiction. I’d say that it was modern gothic – not gothic in the sense of floating nighties and barons twirling moustaches whilst doing the heroine wrong, but in the sort of writing where the horror comes from the location and atmosphere and setting rather than jump scares or gory events.

The story centres around the lead character Wilder Harlow who is a teenaged awkward boy who comes to spend a summer at a Maine coastal town, and finds very intense friendships there that summer, and also gets involved in the mystery of a local weirdo who breaks into homes to take photos of children with a knife near their throat, then sends the photos to the family. What goes on that summer really messes Wilder up, and also leaves him with a lifelong fascination of replaying these events and trying to craft them into a novel that will make him a successful writer. That’s the core novella and that novella is told beautifully – like a Donna Tartt level of capturing the vivid intensity of youth and people trying to find out who they are and who they can be. It’s really delicious.

Then the story becomes the story of how this inciting event, this most significant thing in Wilder’s life, gets stolen and turned into a very schlocky book robbing him of the chance of telling it himself and better, and what he does to try to reclaim it. And it just gets weirder and weirder and leaves you constantly reinterpreting everything else that has gone on before.

Catriona Ward wrote The Last House on Needless Street, which was an absolute cracker, and i think that this is better. It is so rich and evocative and you are just plunged into the characters world and their minds – Wilder is a really flawed lead and occasionally he’s not actually very likeable, but he’s never anything other than compelling.

Highly recommend if you liked Needless Street, or if you like Donna Tartt.