Dark Hollow (Coronet books) [Paperback]

Recent years have seen a flurry of horror writers crossing over to the mystery genre--Peter Straub, Dan Simmons and Kristin Kathryn Rusch are three--but little movement has occurred in the opposite direction. Mysteries are where the commercial action is. When John Connolly, an Irish journalist, burst upon the scene in Great Britain in 1999 with the bestselling Every Dead Thing (it later won the Shamus award for Best First Private Eye Novel when published in the States), it would not have been unfair to describe what he was offering as "horror". However, "shock noir" is probably a better way of describing such a grab-you-by-the-eyelashes thriller, with its high body count and inventively grisly methods of dispatching hapless victims.

Connolly--who seems unconcernedly to be trespassing on Stephen King territory in Dark Hollow, with its Maine setting and echoes of background atrocities--actually brings to mind a slightly different hybridisation of horror and mystery: you might say it's Wilkie Collins re-tooled by James Ellroy. Lurking in his pages is more than a faint whiff of the Victorian triple-decker, with all its gothic complexities, while, at the same time, punctuating the plot are grotesque and excessive acts of sadism of a wholly modern sort that will cause some readers indignantly to close the book.

The trouble is, by doing that they miss a richly ripe, closely textured tale. Connolly's series character, ex-NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker, is a man with a lot of pain to surmount--his wife and child were murdered in Every Dead Thing--but he's also a dogged knight errant attuned to the pain felt by others. In Dark Hollow, his quest for the truth is a twisty one, but he stays the course, and so should you. --Otto Penzler, Amazon.com

To say that John Connolly enjoyed a remarkable success with his first book,Every Dead Thing, is to understate the case. This first thriller featuring Detective "Bird" Parker was a highly unusual entry in the field, written in a raw, arresting style. But is Dark Hollow, the second appearance of Connolly's fiery and inexorable investigator, equally gripping? Connolly himself has remarked that he wanted to give this new book a very sinister feel, rather than just a gruesome one. In this, he has succeeded triumphantly.

This time, Bird--recovering from the murder of his family by The Travelling Man--returns to the scene of happier times, the wintry Maine of his childhood. But relaxation is once again elusive: another young woman is savagely killed along with a child, and Bird's previous encounter with the victims compels him to track down the murderer. There is an obvious suspect, but Bird believes that the real answer lies 30 years in the past. As the body count increases, it becomes apparent that someone else is hunting for Billy, the dead woman's ex-husband and chief suspect in the slaying. And this dangerous figure appears to know Bird intimately. Before long, the tormented detective is investigating the terrifying origins of a mythical killer: the psychopathic Caleb Kyle.

Along with the kind of riveting storytelling skills we have come to expect from Connolly, the author has built into his narrative a superstructure of striking imagery. Predatory nature and the cycle of the seasons feed into the darker corners of the plot and illuminate the grim psychopathology of the characters. Bird remains the most involving of protagonists--and by dovetailing his hero's troubled past into the search narrative, Connolly ensnares the reader to the past page: "'Nice car', he repeated, and a fat white hand emerged from one of his pockets, the fingers like a thick, pale slugs that had spent too long in dark places. He caressed the roof of the Mustang appreciatively, and it seemed as if the paint would corrode spontaneously beneath his fingers". --Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Classic American detective fiction . . . and of a very high order' (Bernard Cornwell, Mail on Sunday )

'Connolly's evocative prose and sharp one-liners make it oddly akin to poetry' (Independent )

'Despite the gore, this second novel is subtler and more complex than the best-selling EVERY DEAD THING. Connolly's lyrical language and occasional mystical passages are reminiscent of James Lee Burke. His hero . . . is developing into a credible and sympathetic personality' (Sunday Telegraph )

'. . . a dark sense of foreboding from the opening pages should will and chill Connolly's considerable fan-base through this second novel at great pace. . . Killer imagery is his secret weapon' (Sunday Business Post, Dublin )

'DARK HOLLOW is a frightening, disturbing and brutal tale interspersed with great moments of dark humour' (Yorkshire Evening Press )

'Connolly is not an easy author to pigeonhole. He is his own man: an original and exuberant story-teller, as he proves once more with this enjoyable book' (Scotland on Sunday )

'Atmospheric, compulsive and deeply upsetting, [DARK HOLLOW] mark(s) the appearance of a writer whose star is most definitely in the ascendancy' (Manchester Metro )

'DARK HOLLOW is a frightening, disturbing and brutal tale interspersed with great moments of dark humour'

'classic American detective fiction . . . and of a very high order'

'Connolly's evocative prose and sharp one-liners make it oddly akin to poetry'

'Ghostly legends and gruesome lynchings merge in another pageturner to send you off to bed with a shivery spine' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Still raw from the brutal slayings of his wife and daughter, and the events surrounding the capture of their killer, The Travelling Man, Charlie Parker retreats to the wintry Maine landscape of his childhood. By following in the steps of his beloved grandfather, Parker hopes to heal his spirit and get through the bitter anniversary of Jennifer and Susan's murder. But the echoes of the past that await him are not all benign. In a gruesome re-enactment of Bird's own nightmares, another young woman is killed with her child and his brief involvement in their lives impels Parker to hunt their vicious murderer. As the death toll mounts, Parker comes to realise that the true answer to the puzzle lies thirty years in the past, in a tree with strange fruit, in his own grandfather's history, and in the perverted desires of a monster incarnate - Caleb Kyle.

John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968. His debut -EVERY DEAD THING - swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. He is the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award.

Billy Purdue's knife bit deeper into my cheek, sending a trickle of blood down my face. His body was pressed hard against mine, his elbows pinning my arms to the wall, his legs tensed against my legs so that I couldn't go for his groin. His fingers tightened on my neck and I thought: Billy Purdue. I should have known better…

Billy Purdue was poor, poor and dangerous with some bitterness and frustration added to spice up the pot. The threat of violence was always imminent with him. It hung around him like a cloud, obscuring his judgement and influencing the actions of others, so that when he stepped into a bar and took a drink, or picked up a pool cue for a game, then sooner or later, trouble would start.
Billy Purdue didn't have to pick fights. Fights picked him.
It acted like a contagion, so that even if Billy himself managed to avoid conflict – he generally didn't seek it, but when he found it he rarely walked away – five would get you ten that he would have raised the testosterone level in the bar sufficiently to cause someone else to consider starting something. Billy Purdue could have provoked a fight at a conclave of cardinals just by looking into the room. Whichever way you considered it, he was bad news.
So far, he hadn't killed anybody and nobody had managed to kill him. The longer a situation like that goes on, the more the odds are stacked in favour of a bad end, and Billy Purdue was a bad beginning looking for a worse end. I'd heard people describe him as an accident waiting to happen, but he was more than that. He was a constantly evolving disaster, like the long, slow death of a star. His was an ongoing descent into the maelstrom.
I didn't know a whole lot about Billy Purdue's past, not then. I knew that he'd always been in trouble with the law. He had a rap sheet that read like a catalogue entry for minor crimes, from disrupting school and petty larceny to DWD, receiving stolen goods, assault, trespassing, disorderly conduct, non-payment of child support…
The list went on and on. He was an adopted child and had been through a succession of foster homes in his youth, each one keeping him for only as long as it took the foster parents to realise that Billy was more trouble than the money from social services was worth. That's the way some foster parents are: they treat the kids like a cash crop, like livestock or chickens, until they realise that if a chicken acts up you can cut its head off and eat it for
Sunday dinner, but the options are more limited in the case of a delinquent child. There was evidence of neglect by many of Billy Purdue's foster parents, and suspicion of serious physical abuse in at least two cases.
Billy had found some kind of home with an old guy and his wife up in the north of the state, a couple who specialised in tough love. The guy had been through about twenty foster kids by the time Billy arrived and, when he got to know Billy a little, maybe he figured that this was one too many. But he'd tried to straighten Billy out and, for a time, Billy was happy, or as happy as he could ever be. Then he started to drift a little. He moved to Boston and fell in with Tony Celli's crew, until he stepped on the wrong toes and got parcelled back to Maine, where he met Rita Ferris, seven years his junior , and they married. They had a son together, but Billy was always the real child in the relationship.
He was now thirty-two and built like a bull, the muscles on his arms like huge hams, his hands thick and broad, the fingers almost swollen in their muscularity. He had small pig eyes and uneven teeth, and his breath smelt of malt liquor and sourdough bread. There was dirt under his nails and a raised rash on his neck, the heads white, where he had shaved himself with an old, worn blade.
I was given the opportunity to observe Billy Purdue from close quarters after I failed to put an arm-lock on him and he pushed me hard against the wall of his silver Airstream trailer, a run-down thirty-footer out by Scarborough Downs that stank of unwashed clothes, rotting food and stale seed. One of his hands was clasped hard around my neck as he forced me upwards, my toes barely touching the floor. The other held the short-bladed knife that had pierced my skin an inch beneath my left eye. I could feel the blood dripping from my chin.