Great Reads for Great Readers

 

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.