A Wee Review - Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

Screw the zeitgeist; this is my year for discovering stuff everyone else has know about for years. Radiohead’s The Bends, for example, The Charlatans, Futurama and Colin Bateman’s Murphy books. Seems only natural then, that nearly ten years after it wowed critics and Joe Public alike, I’ve finally got round to reading John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing.

In case you didn’t know, Every Dead Thing is the first of the Charlie Parker books – after this there are Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind, The White Road, The Black Angel, The Unquiet and The Reapers. The introduction to Parker’s world is brutal and to the point. The homicide detective returns home after a solitary drinking session, right into a nightmare of Hieronymus Bosch proportions. His wife and daughter have been eviscerated in the kitchen. Their bodies have been ritually flayed and gutted, their eyes put out, their faces removed. You get the picture. If you don’t…well, Connolly paints one for you. We are also introduced to a supernatural element that lurks beneath the surface of Every Dead Thing. Charlie Parker, it seems, is sensitive -- for want of a better expression – to vibrations in the ether.

The narrative then leaps ahead to a alcohol-free Parker residing in New York. He’s an occasional private detective, occasional bounty hunter, intent on tracking down the killer of his family, now known as the Travelling Man. Parker takes on the case of a missing child, which takes him to Haven, Virginia, a town with a past it would rather stay buried. The trail eventually loops back to NY where there is a climactic showdown…on page 350 of the 500 page book.

In a lot of respects, Every Dead Thing drops back into first gear at this point and, as such, it’s my one and only real quibble. A reader could skip pages 150 to 350 and not lose their way. It’s only fair to say, though, that particular reader would miss out on a stunning detour. The Haven sideplot is an absolute blast, so long as you can stomach reading about the fate of children snared by psychotic killers. Be warned, this is not a book that sidesteps distressing themes. But while there is an inevitable bleakness to Every Dead Thing, Connolly approaches scenes of dreadful cruelty from two angles; the clinical and the spiritual. Never does he glory in the splatter-gore that lies in between. It’s artful stuff.

Anyway, from New York the trail leads to New Orleans where Parker -- acting on hunches and supernatural tip-offs as well as good old fashioned police work -- uncovers more bodies, and the plot continues to twist and turn like a twisty turny thing until we finally meet the Travelling Man. This book packs an unbelievable amount between its covers and many of the scenes and characters along the way will imprint themselves indelibly on your mind.

Time and again I was astounded at the depth of Connolly’s knowledge. You could be forgiven for thinking he was American pathologist with a special interest in mediaeval art and a penchant for guns. His descriptions of the American townscapes are so vivid you’d be hard pressed to guess the author was a (then) twenty-something Dubliner working for the Irish Times. Either he spent a lot of time in the States, or he researched his arse off and he has a photographic memory. Whatever, he’s an enormously talented bloke.

Impressive stuff, then. And I’ve got another six books to catch up on. So if you’ll just excuse me . . .

Michael Stone

Michael Stone was born in 1966 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Since losing most of his eyesight to Usher Syndrome, he has retreated from your world to travel the dark corners of inner space. To put it more prosaically, he daydreams a lot.

Read more about Michael and his fiction here.