Six Stories by Max Wesolowski

Published – Orenda Books

Published – Out Now

Price – £8.99 paperback £3.99 Kindle eBook

One body
Six stories
Which one is true?
1997. Scarclaw Fell. The body of teenager Tom Jeffries is found at an outward bound centre. Verdict? Misadventure. But not everyone is convinced. And the truth of what happened in the beautiful but eerie fell is locked in the memories of the tight-knit group of friends who embarked on that fateful trip, and the flimsy testimony of those living nearby.

2017. Enter elusive investigative journalist Scott King, whose podcast examinations of complicated cases have rivalled the success of Serial, with his concealed identity making him a cult internet figure. In a series of six interviews, King attempts to work out how the dynamics of a group of idle teenagers conspired with the sinister legends surrounding the fell to result in Jeffries' mysterious death. And who's to blame

As every interview unveils a new revelation, you'll be forced to work out for yourself how Tom Jeffries died, and who is telling the truth.

I too fell down the Serial rabbit hole of a podcast exploring a crime and asking if the convicted murderer was innocent or guilty. It had a compelling mystery; social issues and a few suspects you couldn’t be sure you could trust. It had the best aspect of a puzzle lots of potential explanations but never quite revealing an obvious solution. In Six Stories Matt Wesolowski succeeds in delivering Serial in a fictional form using a very strange tale that covers childhood and growing up, bullying and folklore to create something truly memorable.

In 1997 a small group of teenagers went to a outward bound centre that this particular group had done for a few years. In the middle of the night Tom Jeffries vanishes in the middle of the night. A year later his badly decomposed body is found in a remote area in the middle of the night. There are many suspicions and theories about what may have happened, but no one has ever been convicted. Now Six Stories a podcast with it’s strange masked host Scott King has become involved and over six episodes we will hear his interviews with the people involved; building up a picture of what happened, finding out what happened next to everyone involved and as we reach the final episode the truth will finally be revealed.

This is the kind of thriller you start after a busy day at work and finish a little past your bedtime. It has an absolutely compelling hook and approach. Wesolowski immediately puts us in an atmospheric setting of the remote Scarclaw Fell a typically eerie remote part of the countryside that we find has its own history of collapsed mines and witches that give it a lot of depth and an almost horror story type feel that something lies in wait for the unwary. Then we just have a very strange mystery that manages to fit with every parent’s nightmare losing your child on a school trip and yet no clear answer as to what happens. Scott talks to the organisers; the landowners and in particular the witnesses and remaining members of the group to get each person’s viewpoint and with each witness the version of the truth the reader pieced together alters again.

I loved how changing the perspectives of the event between the characters constantly changes the reader’s ideas of what happened. In particular this novel captures the world of a teenager – someone trying not to be a child, rebelling and also handling things awfully be they relationships, love, drugs and sex. We have a group of people all claiming to be each other’s friends, but we see tensions, rivalries and what we get a lot of effectively character monologues and cleverly we see how each character views the other often different. There is a final layer of watching people age – what happens to the rebel, the clown, the teacher’s daughter and the quiet silent one? We aren’t always going to be our teenage selves and life changes us which I thought gave the tale a dose of reality that makes the framing device of the podcast really work telling us what happened next plus gives you a constant sense of looking for discrepancies that may point towards a culprit.

Throughout the tale here is also a theme of bullying. Wesolowski captures the banal cruelty of teenagers who are happy to torment one of their group or a man with severe autism. This novel goes to dark places and starts pointing smartly towards the finale which is one of the best final parts to a tale I’ve read making you see the whole picture click into place yet feels totally right and downright chilling.