FINAL BOY

This is a horror novel about apples. More than apples, it is also a novel about what happens to people when they get what they want, what price they’re willing to pay for it and what happens to the people around them as they see change they don’t understand. But it is also a lot about apples.

I found myself oscillating whilst reading between wanting to eat apples and eat varieties of apples I’d never heard of before, and never wanting to eat an apple again for the rest of my life, flickering between those two poles even in a couple of pages. It is without a doubt a love letter to apples. And i know that sounds weird – and this is not a slim novella, it is a doorstepper of a book. I wanted much more of it by the time it was over, it was a complete joy.

There are some genuinely creepy moments, as people do all sorts of awful things to people they purport to love, and we watch people’s loved ones corrupt and twist and distort. There are also some very grisly body horror moments. You learn a lot about apples and not in a ‘this author hit wikipedia up’ sort of way, but more that sort of ‘this writer got super, super, super into apples and wants to share that passion and intensity with you’. I totally get that second type and it made me want to quit my job and become an apple hunter like the best character John Compass.

John Compass is a Quaker, a former sniper, an apple hunter, a man with few friends but intense loyalty to them, and he just sets every page he’s on on fire. He’s like the Jack Reacher of apples. I loved him. My only grouse with this book is how sparingly Chuck Wendig uses him, and that’s probably because he’s the Ghost Chilli or Carolina Reaper of characters – he’s so vivid and powerful you can’t have him all the time, as much as you want that.

It moves at a good pace, all of the moving parts work well, and you never really know what’s coming. In the central premise of people being seduced by something that promises everything but they should know that it’s far far too good to be true, it reminded me of Steven King’s Needful Things and for me there’s little finer praise than that.

Of our leads, obviously John Compass is stellar and I would want to read a dozen novels with him in, and then for me the antagonists are better than the other protagonists up until probably the final third of the book. The antagonists are ghastly but fascinating, whereas a couple of the protagonists are fairly whiny and self-centred until they get their stuff together (in part to be fair because their loved ones have stripped them of agency and confidence over quite a long time)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, raced through it and will certainly be coming back for more Chuck Wendig. It’s a cracker.