FINAL BOY

This is a horror novel involving four main characters who grew up in a small town where they were misfits and outcasts, who came together and something terrible happened in their childhood. We join Jamie Warren as an adult, who has been caught drinking at his job at a factory and sent to rehab. The rehab is an ordeal for him, and just as he’s checking out he gets a call to say that his mother has died and that his brother Dennis who appears to have special needs has been picked up by the police wandering around barefoot just repeating the words “She has died”

I’ve read a lot of books where a character is an alcoholic, and very often it is there as a moment of temptation for the character where they stand looking at a bottle of Scotch or have a moment where you think they’re going to crack and then pour the bottle down the sink – that’s not at all how we’re being shown Jamie in this book. He is not a functioning alcoholic, he’s someone that is completely in the grip of addiction – he wants to do the right thing, to be a better person, but there are many occasions where it is vital that he stays sober and events and trauma just so overwhelm him that he’s doing the wrong thing. Despite this, he’s a character that you want to spend time with – he’s completely broken and making terrible decision after terrible decision but you learn why he’s so broken and you just can’t help but root for him.

His mother’s death drags him back to his home town, charged with awful memories and Jamie is utterly ill-equipped to care for his brother Dennis; and then things get a whole lot worse. We start to learn what the tragedy of the childhood was that led to Jamie being put in a young offenders institute and why Jamie, Dennis and his friends Mia and Clay all need to deal with it and face down the worst thing that they can imagine because its happening again to other young people.

Mia is fantastic, by the way, a gonzo horror film-maker who is sparky and brave and kind but is also carrying her own weight, and I could have had much more of her in the book – she just lights up every page she’s on.

The obvious comparison with any adults coming back with childhood friends to face the demons of their childhood is Steven King’s IT, but that’s just because it is such fertile territory for writing and ideas, and I’ve got absolutely no problem with writers using that structure as a jumping off point. The characters here are far more damaged and dark than IT, both as adults and as children, and Ronald Malfi just does such great things with the story. If you liked IT (and who doesn’t?) then its a must-read.

There are so many great pay-offs in the final third of things that have been carefully and subtly set-up and you’ve spent such intense times with the characters that the moments of jeopardy feel real and painful and intense. You feel the losses, you inwardly cheer at any triumphs.

What I really liked most about Ronald Malfi’s writing other than that he continually looks the awful direct in the eye without flinching, is just how much TEXTURE he gets into everything. With Ronald Malfi here, you never get a knife with blood on it, you get a real sense of the weight of the knife in a hand, just how sticky the blood is, the noise it makes when it goes into someone, the metallic smell of the blood. Everything just feels dark and crunchy and real. He’s the best that I’ve read yet at making every moment feel charged and as though its actually all happening.

One of the joys of reading horror I’ve had this year is finding authors whose work I am unfamiliar with and knowing that from this point on, I’m going to read absolutely everything that Ronald Malfi writes and I can’t wait.