The Chalk Man by C J Tudor
Publisher - Penguin
Published - Out Now
Price - £12.99
None of us ever agreed on the exact beginning.
Was it when we started drawing the chalk figures or when they started to appear on their own?
Was it the terrible accident?
Or when they found the first body?
The greatest time in our lives as a description of childhood always puzzled me. Learning how the world and more importantly how people work was hard work and finding out as you grow up that the world is darker and scarier than you originally thought can be very unsettling. Childhood shapes us and often haunts us. In this fantastic thriller by C J Tudor we get a delicious mystery wrapped up with all the horrors of growing up and then growing old.
The story focuses on Ed a teacher at his local school who finds that a major event in his life from 1986 which affected his closest group of friends is now returning into his life. As a child Ed was thrown into a series of events over a year that blew apart his local gang and exposed the darker secrets of the village as well as making him realise adults cannot all be trusted as they too have secrets. This all starts with a violent bloody fairground accident that sets off this chain of events where Ed is thrown into an uneasy friendship with his local teacher Mr Halloran and the ensuing months will reveal more and more about life. Thirty years later and Ed is a man living with his past (often influenced by alcohol) and then one of his old friends returns with a plan to reveal what really happened that year and then all the old gang members find a letter with a chalk man drawn on them – someone seems to know a lot more about their past than anyone realised…
Its really hard to describe this book because one of the greatest satisfactions is watching the past and the present get revealed. We unusually get two real-time narrators who happen to be the same character Ed in 1986 - a pleasant shy but intelligent kid finding the world out as a teenager and Ed in his mid-forties where his life has become frozen and now by the appearance of the chalk men unsettled. With alternating chapters, we see the impact of the past on the present and scene by scene you get a better picture of the place they all live. Small mysteries such as how did a friend end up in a wheelchair to the largest of them all - who murdered a local teenager that Ed’s gang found when the chalk men pointed the way? Kids start to experience death, violence and lies all for the first time and it’s an unsettling experience is anyone the person you think they are? Can we even trust the kids?
It brilliantly plotted and there is enormous satisfaction as you see the bigger picture and realise how all these little revelations make up the bigger mystery, but Tudor also brings two other stand out elements. Characterisation is a major element. The childhood version of the gang really does feel like 80’s kids with Ed, Fat Gav (the loud one); Hoppo (the kind one with his dog); Mickey (the one who no one really knows why you’re his friend) and Nicky (the local Vicar’s daughter who much prefers hanging out in a gang to church). It really captures that sense of childhood friendship and exploring long summer days which makes the later changes to the group both startling and intriguing - whey made them become the people we now see? What are they all running from? Added to this we have the mysterious Mr Halloran the new teacher no one really knows and even Ed’s parents get revealed to have secrets they are keen Ed doesn’t yet understand. There is a whole host of local rivalries and relationships to unpick and the way that is created is fascinating.
My other highlight is the sense of horror. Although this is a murder mystery there is a feeling of something spectral happening. The eerie sight of chalk men; figures in the woods and in dreams who know a lot more than anyone should bring a sense of the uncanny to the village. Scenes of death and violence are much more elaborate than you would find in a Poirot all leading to a feeling that perhaps much more to the way these secrets are being unburied than simply bad timing.
That combination of mystery, horror and the cast that you may not all like, but you really want to understand made this a reading experience where I found myself swept up so much that when I started this on my Bank holiday Monday I didn’t go to sleep until it was done!! I strongly recommend that if you enjoy crime with a touch of the horror about it then you really should give this a go and I look forward to seeing what this author gives us in the future.
