Reviewed by John Cairns
For soldiers, going to war can be like settling into a job in hell's main furnace room. Even for those who survive, a hefty slice of hell may follow them home.
In John Connolly's spooky thriller, The Whisperers (2010, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 410 pages), a group of Iraqi war veterans living in Maine faces more terrifying war-induced dangers in small-town New England than they did in Baghdad. Now reaching bookstores, this story spans many genres. It's a horror-crime-detective-war novel, and in each category, it's better than most.
Together with death and destruction, the latest Iraqi war triggered a ruthless trade in looted antiquities. Corrupt soldiers send such precious objects to North America and later smuggle them across the Canada-United States border toward wealthy buyers.
One-by-one, the culprits begin to hear voices, persistent whispers that won't relent. Their mental anguish looks to outsiders like after-battle woes, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder. “You'd be surprised at how many soldiers dislike fireworks, and I've seen traumatized men hit the deck at the sound of door banging, even a child shooting a toy gun.”
After war-weary Damien Patchett takes his dog on a walk into the woods and commits suicide there, his grieving father Bennett hires private investigator Charlie Parker. Why was Damien the latest in a cluster of ex-soldier suicides? Charlie learns things more brutal and frightening than anyone expects. A supernatural mystery overshadows the earthly ones. Despite its small-town-and-rural setting, this book runs up a body count to rival most battlefields.
War's not pleasant, nor fair. “...the rich always screw the poor, and this was a rich man's war being fought by poor people.” How nasty is it? “War smells. It smells of open sewers and excrement. It smells of garbage and rotting food and standing water. It smells of dog carcasses and human corpses. It smells of the homeless, and the dying, and the dead.”
Adeptly, Connolly engages his readers by inserting details to activate their senses. In a plundered Iraqi museum: “The basement was stiflingly hot, and there was a sharp smell in the air left by the burning foam that the looters had used as torches....”
As for the sense of hearing: “...she would hear the steady buzz of their soft tones through the walls, like insects trapped in the cavities.”
Then there's taste: “I drank some coffee. It tasted like sump oil. If I hadn't watched him pour it, I'd have said that Earle had gone in back and dipped the mug in the bay before giving it to me. Then again, maybe he just kept a couple of really nasty mugs and glasses to one side, for special visitors.”
Some passages nearly cause sensory overload. “Only when the noise from the pipes disturbed the quiet did he realize just how deep was the silence.... Here, too, the sinks were stained with blood, but it had also splashed on the floor and the walls, a great gusher that seemed to have come from the sinks themselves, as though the pipes had spit back all of the fluids that had been washed into them over time. The mirrors above the sinks were almost entirely obscured by the dried blood....”
Connolly gains trust by creating an impression that he knows exactly of what he writes. That includes embarking on a military mission: “...they performed their own intimate motions, touching medals, crosses, pictures of their families. Whatever routines had kept them alive in the past, they made sure to maintain. All soldiers were superstitious.”
And the same goes for war-zone behavior. “Like their fellow soldiers, they had become adept at ‘cutting squares’: zig-zagging, ducking, moving back and forth, and bobbing their heads in order to provide a more difficult target to hit. Pritchard called it the ‘Battlefield Boogie’, Vernon the ‘Jihad Jitterbug’. What was odd was that neither man could dance to save his life on a regular dance floor, but threatened by an expert killer they had moved like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.”
More routinely, anyone who walks a dog will nod in recognition at this sentence: “When the call came again, and she heard the sound of her leash jangling, she took the stairs two at a time, almost falling over her own legs with excitement when she reached the bottom.”
With Connolly, even the usually pleasant arrival of spring weather sounds ominous. “Now May had brought summer at last, and all things were awake. All things.”
Irish-born, 42-year-old Connolly has cobbled together a colorful past. Before turning into a bestselling author, he worked as a journalist, barman, waiter and much more. Although based in Dublin, he spends much of his time in the United States.
Connolly's earlier books include: Every Dead Thing (his first novel, 1999), The Killing Kind, Bad Men, The Black Angel, The Unquiet and The Reapers. Troubled investigator Parker has become a regular character who appears in nine novels.
As a multi-genre tale that outshines its rivals, no matter on which bookshelf it goes, The Whisperers easily demonstrates Connolly's skills and versatility. He may convince most readers that quaint-looking Maine hides unseen hazards.
Approval rating: 81 per cent.
For more information: www.johnconnollybooks.com
(June 1, 2010)
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