Fiction Reviews
The Bloodstained Doll
(2024) John Everson, Flame Tree Press,
£12.95 / Can$21.95 / US$16.95, trdpbk, 311pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58887-5
This is not an SF or horror novel but a fast-moving crime thriller in the Italian Giallo tradition of which Everson is a huge fan. For the most part the book is great fun but it seriously unravels as all credibility and reader credulity falls apart in the high-octane, closing, bloodbath chapters.
There are very well established sinister goings on throughout and an Old Dark House atmosphere pervades. It begins when British Allyson’s mother dies and Allyson is obliged to go away to live with her grotesque relatives in a crumbling German Mansion. The household seem perverted and secretive. She is barely settled in before skeletons pop up everywhere, or rather they don’t, as the first mystery is the discovery of a child’s coffin in the grounds of the estate, but where is the body? The casket is empty.
As Allyson tries to make sense of the mystery and avoid being groped by her lecherous Uncle Otto and the equally odious family physician, bodies do start popping up. Virtually anyone Allyson meets tends to get killed in the next chapter, and the killer leaves a broken doll effigy by each victim.
Allyson finds she is being followed everywhere she goes.
My problem is how slow Allyson is to report her concerns and sense of being threatened to the police. She has a mobile phone but never seems to make a simple emergency call. Worse, the police are barely even trying to ask the right questions, to the point at which I had them clocked up as accomplices or direct suspects, but it is simply that they are not drawn in as a quick solution by the author.
The chapters are short, 71 chapters plus an epilogue in just over 300 pages, with many chapters ending on cliff-hangers and stark revelations. The Berger family Allyson finds herself living with are quite a rogue’s gallery of rogues. Men take Allyson for drinks and meals and pick the menu items for her. She is frequently molested. Even the one chap she finds alliance with, a grocery delivery man, has something to hide.
The finale gets simply ridiculous, and almost becomes a parody of the genre, and characters present get no say or action for so long that it is easy to forget they are there in overcrowded scenes until they suddenly do or say something to get involved again. The early chapters set up so much potential, but the author fails to make it pay off and in many ways there are too many characters, too much sleaze and some could be merged into fewer characters.
There are rooms that should not be entered but which inevitably Allyson does venture. There is blackmail and mysterious phone calls. Everson lays out as many aspects of the mystery as he can, throwing in every ingredient possible to the point at which the tastes on offer cancel one another out. It’s still a fun read, but it moves ultimately from mystery to adventure and a question who will get out of the mess alive. The revelation of who is behind what is no big deal as, apart from Allyson and a few minor characters, everyone is so glaringly revolting anyway.
Arthur Chappell
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