The Night House, by Jo Nesbo.

 

      

      Internationally acclaimed Swedish crime novelist Jo Nesbo has embarked on a different literary journey this time around:  his classic burnt-out detective Harry Hole is nowhere to be seen as Nesbo decides to take an apparent trip into the supernatural where there are no rules, and no end to the horrific ways that people can die.  He also offers us plot alternatives:

1.      Richard Elauved is 14 years old and has just lost both his parents in a fire that engulfed their apartment.  He has been sent to the country to live with his uncle and aunt, his only relatives.  He hates himself, his life, and his new classmates, and bullies them relentlessly – until he sees one of his victims devoured by a telephone (hey, I’m only the messenger!), then another classmate is turned into a ‘magicicada’ with brilliant red eyes and the wings to escape him when he tries to crush it – in short, he was the last person to see these missing kids alive so the authorities place him in a special ‘school’ to see if he will confess to anything he hasn’t yet told them.  His escape from the school is more unbelievable than cannibalistic phones, but ends on a hopeful note, so that the reader can handle Alternative Two, which is:

2.     Richard Hansen, successful teen fiction writer is invited to a school reunion fifteen years after the above events;  it transpires that we were reading above the plot of his first smash hit and at the subsequent celebrations he is touchingly modest about his literary achievements to his adoring classmates, none of whom  have reached such fame.  It’s great to be the centre of such respectful attention and, in a rare moment of remorse for his 14 year-old behaviour, he apologises for being a bully – only to realise as the evening progresses, that the whole night has been organised by all his ‘fans’ to pay him back for the terrible hurt he caused them all to suffer.  Do they succeed?  Alternative Three reveals that:

3.     It’s time for Richard to wake up – wake up from ElectroConvulsive Therapy applied to him as an experimental treatment to help him forget the terrible memories that have trapped him in a hospital known as the Night House for the last fifteen years, and to take his first tentative steps back to a normal life.

 

Jo Nesbo has again taken his readers on a wild ride to the dark side and back – is there nothing he cannot do to stop us devouring every page?  Even kid-eating telephones get past our BS meter!  He’s the best.  FIVE STARS.

 

 

Until the Road Ends, by Phil Earle.                  Junior Fiction.

 

 

         Beau is a stray barely existing on the mean streets of London in 1939;  life is haphazard at best, cruel for the rest of the time – until he is rescued from death by Peggy, His Girl, His Saviour, and brought back to her home in Balham to live safely with her family.  Who put up some half-hearted objections which she dispenses with in seconds:  her younger brother Wilf has Mabel, Queen of the Couch, a cat far too full of her own self-importance, so Peggy is entitled to have her very own pet, too.  Who could deny the fairness of that arrangement?  Only Queen Mabel, who loathes Beau on sight and wastes no time in telling him so in the most scathing of tones, but he doesn’t care, because someone, Peggy, loves him!  It is a wonderful, heady feeling and Beau hopes it will never end.

            But.  In the way of all Happily-ever-afters, nothing remains the same:  Hitler and his planes eventually start bombing London, and it is decided that London’s children should be evacuated to ‘the country’ where they will be safe – oh, and people should ‘put their pets down’ because food will be rationed and there will be none to spare for cats and dogs. 

            Peggy and Wilf are devastated.  They don’t want to leave their darling mum and dad, but they will do so only if mum and dad promise to keep looking after Beau and Mabel;  they couldn’t bear it if they were to come home at the end of all the conflict to find that their most-loved pets in the entire world had been killed because they needed to be fed.  Their parents, being honourable people, agreed, and the children were sent off to the coast 100 miles away, to live with Aunty Sylvia, Dad’s sister, who didn’t know one end of a child from another.  But what could be done?  Needs must.

            And Beau went out nightly with Peggy’s Dad who was an air-raid warden, a job Beau became famous for, because Beau could smell people buried under the rubble;  in fact he was so good at it that no-one dare say he should be put down- until the terrible night when a huge bomb destroyed their lives forever, and Beau – and Mabel – are on their own.

            But not quite.  Their next-door neighbour Bomber, a carrier pigeon fully trained in delivering military messages convinces them to try to reach their much-loved Peggy and Wilf:  If it can be done, it WILL be done!  And Beau and Mabel’s adventures begin in earnest.

            This is a beautiful story, predictably heart-breaking and fraught with suspense – but also based on fact:  there really was a dog trained to find people under the rubble;  he sniffed out more than 100 people buried alive beneath their homes.  His name was Rip and he was a Hero.  As so many were at that terrible time.  FIVE STARS.  For readers 11+.