I would like to thank Titan for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – Out Now

Price – £8.99 paperback £6.65 Kindle eBook

Sean hasn’t spoken a word since he was put into care. When he is sent to live with his grandad, a retired author and total stranger, Sean suddenly finds himself living an affluent life, nothing like the estate he grew up in, where gangs run the streets and violence is around every corner.

Sean embraces a new world of drawing, sculpting and reading his grandad’s stories. But his grandad has secrets in his past. As his grandad retreats to the shed, buried at the end of his treasured garden, The Baku emerges.

The Baku is ancient, a creature that feeds on our fears, and it corrupts everything it touches. Plagued by nightmares, with darkness spreading through the house, Sean must confront his fears to free himself and his grandad from the grip of the Baku.

Childhood is full of terrors as everyone knows. The world we have to understand doesn’t make sense and can often be dangerous. Arguably stories are one way of allowing those fears to be understood and faced and perhaps also were authors too get to put their own fears too. In R L Boyle’s ambitious The Book of Baku a young teenager has to face fears real and possibly supernatural, but the overall result didn’t pay off as much as I was hoping for.

Teenager Sean after an unspecified incident at home is now mute and about to start living with his Grandfather in the posher part of town from the estate that he has grown up on all his life. He is ignoring his therapists’ efforts to get him to talk and he cuts himself off from all his old friends. He initially enjoys life with his Grandfather but then finds a book that his Grandfather wrote The Book of Baku about a mythical creature that eats kid’s bad dreams but then had a price to be paid. Sean starts having dreams based on one book that start to creep into waking life. The Baku appears to be after him.

Boyle is a talented author and can create individual scenes of horror, warmth (I love the scenes of Sean and his friends for sounding like real teenagers) and suspense particularly where we get book excerpts, Sean’s dreams and the moments bleed into Seans’s world are really effective and pulled me into the story. The relationship with Sean and his Grandad is also really interesting firstly full of warmth but then life gets shadowy possibly due to the Baku or possibly each other’s demons coming back to haunt them and there is a fascinating thread of the Grandfather’s pristine garden becoming ever more ruined and rotten mirroring the deteriorating relationships between them. Boyle can also give us scenes of the joy and terror of living in a rough working class area where drug gangs operate and fight but also neighbours look out for the vulnerable. All these scenes individually for me where quite effective.

The downside was it did feel either it needed less plot strands or a few more pages to properly explore some of the many plot strands it sets up. Is this tale about art helping people move on; how life is like in tougher parts of a city or a horror story focused on one child and his own demons haunting him. A tale of a young man under attack from drug gangs or one who is learning through caring for other creatures to care for himself? It was very readable but felt a little frenetic moving from story line to storyline and then trying to explain all of Sean’s secrets from the main plot in a few pages at the end. A little more breathing space or less plots and I think this would have really engrossed me into exploring social issues and delivering great horror but for me slightly missed on delivering both consistently – it is rare though I think this book needed to be a bit longer!

Boyle is a very engaging writer and one I will be very interested to see what they have for us in the future. Ambition in a first novel is something I wish we got more of than playing it safe but in this instance The Book of Baku is a decent YA horror and a writer with a lot of potential to keep an eye on.