In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy little English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code; little chalk stick figures they leave for each other as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing will ever be the same.
Another book by an author I had not previously heard of, but following on in the same genre as my previous book – The Woman in the Window.
Again, the reason I decided to give this book a go was mainly down to recommendation tweet posted by Stephen King, which stated simply “if you like my stuff, you’ll like this”. On the whole, I would have to agree with this statement as it was quite a page turner and reminded me a lot of the works of Stephen himself (you can certainly tell that the author is a big fan and grew up reading his books).
The story revolves around Eddie Munster and his four closest friends (Fat Gav, Metal Mickey, Hoppo and Nicky) and it alternates between 1986 and 2016, something which I felt worked really well, although I did notice a few occasions where the events being described in one of the ‘2016 chapters’ seemed to have merged too much into what should have been a 1986 chapter – perhaps the author confused herself whilst writing it (although if that was the case, it should have been picked up in proof reading).
The other character who plays a key part in the story, although he is not quite a main character, as the other five are, is Mr Halloran, who is a teacher at the children’s school (I wonder if the choice of name is another nod to a famous character from Stephen King’s The Shining…)
Eddie gets quite close to Mr Halloran due to the events which happen early on in the book and also later due to the ‘main event’ of the book which shapes the lives of each character as they grow up, some never leaving the village they grew up in and others who are drawn back to the village many years later.
There were three key elements within this book which reminded me of Stephen King, firstly the group of characters, four boys and one girl, somewhat similar to the Losers Club in It (although a couple of members short), the second being a rock fight which happens between the group and one of the group’s brothers, again very reminiscent of IT and finally the whole part of finding a body, which was a very similar premise to The Body (or more well known as Stand By Me).
There were many a twist and turn throughout this book, maybe my brain is just not cut out for this sort of book, because not once did I guess what was coming next and was surprised each time the plot twisted and one of the characters did something very unexpected, right down the multiple reveals at the end of the book – these were a total surprise to me!
Overall Rating – 4.0 / 5.0
