Whistle

Bestselling author Linwood Barclay turns his writing skill from crime and mystery toward something truly terrifying – a novel of Horror. What makes this such a scary read is the author’s voice which holds the reader’s hand in a firmly reassuring grip but as the narrative progresses, it leads the reader into some horrifying edifices.

The novel takes place not long after the millennium, with the fears from the NY Twin Towers Terrorist outrage - still raw. The main protagonist Annie Blunt is a best–selling children’s author-illustrator of the ‘Peirce the Penguin’ books. She’s living a happy family life in a Manhattan brownstone, following her discovery by Editor Finnegan Spoule of Langley House [a niche-boutique imprint of a major publisher]. Husband John and Son Charlie make Annie’s life whole, until it isn’t.

Tragedy strikes, breaking Annie’s perfect family life – first with a small boy [Evan Corcoran] who tries to emulate Peirce the Penguin’s ability to fly by walking from a high-rise window using cardboard wings. The child’s death fills Annie with guilt. Despite her editor Finnegan Spoule and her publishers telling her this tragedy has nothing to do with her work – Annie remains distraught.

They say tragedies come in threes, and for Annie this axiom soon appears true. With her husband Charlie being the second tragedy – she is whisked away from New York by Finnegan Spoule, to the fictitious New England town of Lucknow. The location of her third tragedy.

She and Charlie are provided with a summer rental on the outskirts of Lucknow to escape New York to recover from the twin tragedies of Charlie [Traynor] and Evan [Corcoran]. The house is provided courtesy of her publishers, and includes a ‘studio-cum-office’ fitted with materials for Annie, should she slowly try to return to her world of Peirce the Penguin. Annie does return to her work, but instead of crafting a cuddly animal like the best-selling flying penguin; instead she draws and then models in plasterscene a monster, namely a trench-coated rat-wolf hybrid. This creature is something that lurked in her ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ memory of walking through Penn Station, or was it a nightmarish-dream?

Her son Charlie discovers a model trainset in a box, in a shed at the rear of the summer rental, which he sets up on the floor of his mother’s studio-office, overlooked by the plastercene trench-coated rat-wolf monster.

Soon, Annie and Charlie are visited by their elderly neighbours Daniel Patton and his wife Delores who is slowly drifting into dementia. There is an ominous whistle of a train that wakes Annie who discovers Charlie missing, sleep-walking to the railroad tracks as if beckoned by a ghost train.

Meanwhile, the local Chief-of-Police Harry Cook has his work cut-out in the normally sleepy town of Lucknow. Harry enlists the help of the Lucknow Leader’s sole journalist Rachel Bosma in the mystery of missing men, Walter Hillman and Angus Tanner. Pets start acting weird, a woman commits suicide by dropping a live model-transformer into her bathtub and the strange occurrences escalate.

Harry ponders upon the significance of the stranger in town, the colourfully cheerful Edwin Nabler [aka Mr Choo-Choo], who runs a model-train shop in town.

Barclay’s narrative plot-threads start to converge like the train-tracks and hypnotic whistle of the dangerous model trains, until the reader tears through the novel as the climax comes into view.

Horror rarely gets this creepy burrowing under your skin, until it cuts into your bones.

Hugely recommended.