Book Review | Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough

Since her husband walked out, Louise has made her son her world, supporting them both with her part-time job. But all that changes when she meets David.

Young, successful and charming—Louise cannot believe a man like him would look at her twice, let alone be attracted to her. But that all comes to a grinding halt when she meets his wife, Adele.

Beautiful, elegant and sweet, Louise's new friend seems perfect in every way. As she becomes obsessed by this flawless couple, entangled in the intricate web of their marriage, they each, in turn, reach out to her.

But only when she gets to know them both does she begin to see the cracks. Is David really is the man she thought she knew? Is Adele as vulnerable as she appears? Just what terrible secrets are they both hiding—and how far will they go to keep them?

***

"Whatever you do, don't give away that ending," demands the marketing materials attached to review copies of Sarah Pinborough's new book. And I won't—I wouldn't have even in lieu of the publisher's playful plea—but it won't be easy, because the best thing about Behind Her Eyes is that surprise.

A work of fiction twined around a twist that is, shall we say, entangled with something supernatural, Behind Her Eyes is likely to elicit a few screams of "Don't cross the streams!" And understandably so, I suppose. Early on, it gives every impression of being a harmless bit of grip-lit, and if you haven't read any Pinborough in the past, you'd be right to be wrong-footed by the surprisingly speculative turn her latest tale takes. That said, this—this willingness to futz with the formula of both genres—was precisely what made it such a satisfying read for me.

Like The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl before it, Behind Her Eyes is a book that you don't so much read as ride. It's a little slow for a rollercoaster, though. The first act, in fact, is all superficial setup. We meet Louise, a thirtysomething who loves her little boy more than life itself; a lovely lady, but oh so lonely. As she says to her much more settled best friend, "Being a single mum in London eking out a living as a psychiatrist's part-time secretary doesn't exactly give me a huge number of opportunities to throw caution to the wind and go out every night in the hope of meeting anyone, let alone 'Mr Right.'" (pp.12-13) But then she does. She meets him, in a bar after a few beers, and makes out with him. His name is David, and—damn it all!—he's married.

Louise doesn't want to be a home-breaker, not least because her own ex-husband cheated on her with another woman, so she calls time on their potential affair. And it would have ended there—it would have, she's sure—if David, as she discovers the next day, didn't happen to be her new boss.

Book Review | The Death House by Sarah Pinborough

Toby's life was perfectly normal... until it was unravelled by something as simple as a blood test.

Taken from his family, Toby now lives in the Death House; an out-of-time existence far from the modern world, where he, and the others who live there, are studied by Matron and her team of nurses. They're looking for any sign of sickness. Any sign of their wards changing. Any sign that it's time to take them to the sanatorium.

And no one returns from the sanatorium.

Withdrawn from his house-mates and living in his memories of the past, Toby spends his days fighting his fear. But then a new arrival in the house shatters the fragile peace, and everything changes.

Because everybody dies. It's how you choose to live that counts.

***

A slim, sorrowful volume that splits the difference between The Fault in Our Stars and The Girl with All the Gifts, The Death House documents the last days of several students in a school full of Defectives: young people who have been taken from their parents and installed in an isolated location because of something bad in their blood. Something that'll kill them all before long.

It's school but not school. Like this whole place is life but not life. At least the teachers, who disappear off to their own wing once lessons are done, will get out of here. Sometimes I'll catch one watching us as we work as if we're animals in a zoo. I can never decide quite what the look is. Fascination or fear, or maybe a bit of both.

Maybe a bit of both is appropriate...

On the back of The Language of Dying, a life-affirming dark fantasy about the passing of a man with lung cancer, Sarah Pinborough opts not to detail the Defective gene here. That isn't to say there aren't certain suggestions—implications that when the time comes, the kids in question will turn into monsters of a sort; monsters some of them have seen in the movies the school screens each week. To wit, we can guess what happens next. We can guess that death is essentially a blessing on the affected.

The kids struggle to see it that way, because of course they do—they're kids. Boys and girls from eight to eighteen bundled into black vans and largely left to their own devices on an island where they make friends and enemies, fight and make light; where they do whatever they can do, in truth, to avoid facing the fate that awaits them.

Guest Post | "Stranger Than Fiction" by Sarah Pinborough

I am not a natural researcher when it comes to writing fiction. I find it slows the act of storytelling down—I like to get into a flow with the words and pausing to check facts can be jarring. I love reading historical fiction but I vowed to myself I would never write it. Then I came across the Thames Torso murders, and having read Dan Simmons' The Terror [doesn't get better, does it? — Ed] I felt inspired to give writing a blend of fact and fiction ago. 

I took advice from several friends who've written historical fiction and their universal top tip—which I've since passed on—is not to get bogged down in trying to research everything before you start. You can get lost in it, and by the time you come to need a small piece of information, like for example, what a middle-class late-Victorian family might have for dinner, you've forgotten what your research told you. 

Also, you can get caught up in tiny details and miss big things. While writing Mayhem I very nearly missed the Dockers' Strike of 1889, and given that some of my action takes place in the wharves, that could have been disastrous. When planning Murder the first thing I did was a quick search on major events that happen during each year of the book. Although Murder is quite a claustrophobic story of paranoia, Queen Victoria's diamond Jubilee took place during one of the years of the story. It was a huge nationwide celebration and to not feature it would have damaged the authenticity of the narrative.

Writing a novel set in Victorian London can also be a double-edged sword in that we each have an image of the era in our heads from various film and television adaptations of famous novels. In some respects, that's great in that you don't have to set up the entire world for the reader, but the danger is that your description can become generic. Luckily, if you dig around on the internet (the saviour of the modern writer) you can find some great contemporary accounts of various parts of the city written by journalists and diarists of the time which help with small details and getting the atmosphere of the place right.

Newspaper archives are also great for understanding the feel of the era. I subscribe to the Times Archive (all the newspaper articles in both Mayhem and Murder are authentic), and I searched for murders that made the papers of the day and investigations that both Dr Thomas Bond and Henry Moore were involved in (other than the most famous, the Jack the Ripper case) to use as the backdrop to events in Murder.

When I'd found those I also read other sections of the newspapers to try and get into the mentality of the period—the social issues, the politics etc. in order to make my characters' behaviours more realistic. It's surprising how similar in many ways we are to those who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. We both exist in fast-changing times with huge divisions between the rich and poor and the problems that come with that.

Using real people and events from history creates its own problems when weaving a story around them but I've thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a magic in having written a book about people who you come to think of as 'your' characters and then searching old newspaper reports and learning more and more about their fascinating lives. I love writing fiction, but if there's one thing I've learned from writing these novels, it's that there is sometimes nothing stranger than fact.

Book Review | Murder by Sarah Pinborough

Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, thinks he has finally recovered from the terrible events of years before. He no longer has nightmares about Jack the Ripper—or the other monster, an enemy even more malign who hid in Jack’s shadow and haunted the streets of London at the end of the 1880s. He has made his peace with his part in bringing calm back to the East End.

His fame as a profiler of criminals is increasing, his practice is steads, and Dr Bond is beginning to dream of marriage, and children. Life is good.

But when a woman’s body is found brutally beaten to death in a railway carriage and a letter written years before is discovered by the police, the past he has fought so hard to put behind him begins to taint the present, and he can no longer fight his new suspicions.

Just when he thought life had returned to normal, Dr Bond is about to discover that some things will not remain buried: once again his uncanny enemy is loose on the streets of London... and this time Dr Bond is alone.

***

Mayhem was "a moody whodunit with an horrific twist, set in London during Jack the Ripper's red reign." This was essentially set dressing, however. Instead of simply reiterating that grisly business, as many such texts have been content to, Sarah Pinborough's plot revolved around "another real life serial killer, namely the Thames Torso Murderer, and the factual figures who set out to apprehend him," including Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, who returns—rather the worse for wear—in Murder.

It's been six years since the shocking events at the end of Mayhem, which saw Bond and his assistants in all things mystical—a priest and a pauper—catch and kill the Thames Torso Murderer: one James Harrington; husband of the beautiful Juliana, whose heart the doctor dearly desires.

Harrington, for his part, was hardly to blame for his horrendous descent: it was the Upir—a violent parasite he picked up in Poland—which led him down that dark path. And though the host is dead, the creature he carried on his back lives still... and hungers, I shouldn't wonder.

Murder begins with Bond feeling free of these fears for the first time in recent years, and planning, at long last, to propose to Juliana. But his hopes have to go on hold when an American friend of Harrington's arrives in the capital with a collection of confessional letters which implicate their late acquaintance in some truly unspeakable deeds.

To keep up appearances, he has to be seen to take these seriously, and inevitably, his investigations lead him back to Jack. Harrington, he realises, couldn't have been the Ripper, as he had in his heart of hearts hoped... but perhaps his parasite played a part. Perhaps the mayhem that the Upir created in its wake drove another member of Juliana's family to madness. Perhaps her outwardly affable father, whose alibi falls apart the moment Bond subjects it to the slightest scrutiny, is a killer in their midst.

Book Review | The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough

Tonight is a special, terrible night.

A woman sits at her father's bedside watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters — all traumatised in their own ways, their bonds fragile — have been there for the past week, but now she is alone.

And that's always when it comes.

As the clock ticks in the darkness, she can only wait for it to find her...

***

In my review of Mayhem, published this past spring, I suggested that generations hence, people will revere this as the year of Sarah Pinborough. With six of her books published in the six months since, I think my argument still stands. There was Poison, Charm and Beauty too — a trio of neat novellas riffing on familiar fairy tales with such warmth and wit that Once Upon a Time seems shallow and artless in comparison — whilst the final volume of her first trilogy, The Forgotten Gods, will be re-released in North America in early December, as the previous books in said series have been throughout 2013.

It falls to The Language of Dying to bring the year of Sarah Pinborough to a conclusion, and the postscript it presents is both bittersweet and truly beautiful. It's a life-affirming short novel about a tired old man waiting to die and the family of five that come together to bid him goodbye, and though I did not enjoy it at all, from first to last I admired The Language of Dying wholeheartedly.

It begins, as will we, with this:

There is a language to dying. It creeps like a shadow alongside the passing years and the taste of it hides in the corners of our mouths. It finds us whether we are sick or healthy. It is a secret hushed thing that lives in the whisper of the nurses' skirts as they rustle up and down our stairs. They've taught me to face the language one syllable at a time, slowing creating an unwilling meaning. 

Cheyne-Stoking. (p.1)

In other words a common consequence of chain smoking; as is the terminal lung cancer our unnamed narrator's father has. He's been struggling for months, falling further and further from the waking world for weeks, and with only her to help; meanwhile she, as we'll see, has issues of her own — not least the fear that she simply doesn't fit. To her credit, however, she's been with him since the beginning of this... and she'll see it through to the end as well.

Book Review | Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough

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When a rotting torso is discovered in the vault of New Scotland Yard, it doesn't take Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, long to realise that there is a second killer at work in the city where, only a few days before, Jack the Ripper brutally murdered two women in one night.

Though just as gruesome, this is the hand of a colder killer, one who lacks Jack's emotion.

And, as more headless and limbless torsos find their way into the Thames, Dr Bond becomes obsessed with finding the killer. As his investigations lead him into an unholy alliance, he starts to wonder: is it a man who has brought mayhem to the streets of London, or a monster?

***

Generations hence, it's entirely possible that people will revere 2013 as the year of Sarah Pinborough. She's been absolutely everywhere of late—the first of her modern-day fairytales, Poison, was published just this month, merely a few weeks after North America's introduction to The Forgotten Gods in A Matter of Blood—and that trend looks to continue for the foreseeable future: Ace Books plan to release the remainder of said supernatural noir trilogy before Christmas, meanwhile Poison will promptly be joined by Charm and Beauty too.

And then there's Mayhem. Mayhem, which I enjoyed more than any of the Sarah Pinborough I've had the pleasure of reading previously. It's a moody whodunit with an horrific twist, set in London during Jack the Ripper's red reign. But this is essentially atmospheric set dressing: Mayhem revolves around another real life serial killer, namely the Thames Torso Murderer, and the factual figures who set out to apprehend him, or her... or it, as the case may be.

At the outset, the author confesses to playing slightly fast and loose with the truth, and I want to thank her for that: like one of the characters caught up in the terrible events Mayhem in a sense supplements, I may never have gone near water again otherwise, and that could've proved... problematic.

In any event, it's 1888, and Saucy Jack is the talk of the town. London, however, is as loud as it is cowed, as Inspector Moore muses whilst discussing the state of play in the pub:

"Londoners were strange folk, he had concluded a long time ago, never more alive than when in the presence of death. The food stands which had sprung up at the murder sites, the street theatres recreating the tableaux of the unfortunate women's deaths: entertainment crafted by the grip of terror. Was it too much, perhaps, he wondered as he looked at the glazed eyes and flushed faces of those who filled the surrounding tables. There was something amiss in the people of the city, even he could sense that: a hysteria maybe. There had been too much violence done on London's streets this year. It needed to slow down" (pp.64-65)

It does anything but. Within weeks, Jack is back, and in the intervening period it's become clear that the torsos in the Thames are the work of another murderer—thanks in part to the efforts of Dr. Thomas Bond, a Scotland Yard surgeon who sees "something... other," (p.88) something still more chilling than the Ripper killings, in the dismembered body parts he has examined.

Bond—our protagonist, and the only character whose chapters are related from the first person—is an insomniac opium eater who soon becomes obsessed with the Thames Torso case. When in the course of supplying his spiralling habit in a dingy den one evening he meets a man in a long black coat, he's struck with the certainty that he has seen this stranger before. Eventually he connects the suspect to the scene of a previous crime... but Bond doesn't immediately tell his superiors. He opts to follow the fellow himself.

Not right down the rabbit hole, but slowly, so. Little does our hero realise that the old man is hot on the heels his own embodiment of evil. With a perfectly straight face he refers to it as "a parasite [...] An ancient wickedness. Something from a legend almost forgotten. It is rotten. Old, earthy—but it is sentient; it wants our reactions to it. It wants us to hunt it. It enjoys the game." (p.196) Bond isn't so far gone as to swallow the crazy stranger's story whole. As he admits, "this nonsense was not what I had been expecting," (p.118) but in time he comes to wonder if their murderers, however differently envisioned, might not be one and the same... man or monster.

One of Mayhem's greatest strengths is how the narrative of the novel develops in tandem with its central character. Bond is to begin with an upstanding man of science—and Mayhem, initially, is a fairly familiar crime thriller. Over-familiar, even, since it's set in a time and a place explored to the point of pointlessness by any number of other authors. That said, Pinborough's conceptualisation of ye olde East End is perfectly credible, and from early on, the reader realises that there's something amiss in this picture; something fictional amongst the factual.

That's the Upir, and the closer our protagonist comes to accepting the possibility of its existence, the more the story diverges from the crime thriller's typical tack, carving a course of its own. Come the conclusion it's hard to credit that there was nothing ostensibly speculative about the larger part of Mayhem's narrative, because the feeling that there will be is pervasive from the first: a fine line between too much and not enough the author walks wonderfully.

Discovering what shape the supernatural elements of the tale will take is reason enough to read on, particularly considering the barely restrained manner and measure of Pinborough's prose, but there's much more to recommend Mayhem. However often we've seen it previously, its setting is exceptionally well rendered; its array of primary and secondary perspectives are purposeful and plainly entertaining... though in one case too pointed to buy into entirely. The atmosphere, however, is fantastic without caveat; meanwhile the pace is great—full steam ahead until the end—and the plot not at all ponderous.

Not a year's gone by since Sarah Pinborough's made her debut almost a decade ago that hasn't seen the release a new novel with her name on it, so she's always been prolific, if not to the extent she will be in 2013. You won't catch this critic complaining in any case. A Matter of Blood was a high watermark for me amongst the work of hers I had read—a compelling blend of contemporary crime fiction and classic dark fantasy—but Mayhem is even better: wholly absorbing Victorian horror with just enough of the ordinary about it to set the extraordinary off.

Next stop, Murder most horrid!

***

Mayhem
by Sarah Pinborough

UK Publication: May 2013, Jo Fletcher Books

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