![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Reading XLIII and XLVI
Two follow-ups to John Connolly's Every Dead Thing (see here). There is distinctly a pattern emerging - employed on case he doesn't want to take on, people associated with the case are murdered, he calls on Angel and Louis, the police warn him off, he is confronted by one or more of the villains, he is forced to tell the police almost everything, one of his group is kidnapped...
XIII: John Connolly, Dark Hollow (2000)
Here he is trying to get someone to pay alimony to a mother and child, only for the mother and child to be murdered. The father is an obvious suspect, especially when he disappears, so Parker tries to track him down, increasingly convinced as the body counts mount up, that there is a connection with an unsolved murder case from thirty years previously.
I confess to be disconcerted by the scenes - especially those at the start - which are told in the the third person but are presumably reconstructions by Parker. There is for me a sense of it being too much told - too often we get a chapter ending "I would never see them alive again" or "That was my mistake." It doesn't trust the suspense it has generated.
Here we also see the beginnings of a move into the supernatural/fantastic as Parker starts seeing ghosts of dead people.
XIVI: John Connolly, The Killing Kind (2001)
Parker here investigates the apparent suicide of his client's best friend's daughter, which is connected to a shadowy religious cult and the mass death of a religious community nearly forty years earlier. The fellowship tell him to take a hike, the sinister arachnophile Mr Pudd tries to kill him, and half the people he questions end up being murdered.
Parker seems to know a huge amount about Biblical materials and literature - which I didn't feel prepared for by the character. He's also seeing more ghosts, and other characters can tell he's seeing them. Of course, it's his story, but the leaning seems more toward the marvellous than the uncanny.
XIII: John Connolly, Dark Hollow (2000)
Here he is trying to get someone to pay alimony to a mother and child, only for the mother and child to be murdered. The father is an obvious suspect, especially when he disappears, so Parker tries to track him down, increasingly convinced as the body counts mount up, that there is a connection with an unsolved murder case from thirty years previously.
I confess to be disconcerted by the scenes - especially those at the start - which are told in the the third person but are presumably reconstructions by Parker. There is for me a sense of it being too much told - too often we get a chapter ending "I would never see them alive again" or "That was my mistake." It doesn't trust the suspense it has generated.
Here we also see the beginnings of a move into the supernatural/fantastic as Parker starts seeing ghosts of dead people.
XIVI: John Connolly, The Killing Kind (2001)
Parker here investigates the apparent suicide of his client's best friend's daughter, which is connected to a shadowy religious cult and the mass death of a religious community nearly forty years earlier. The fellowship tell him to take a hike, the sinister arachnophile Mr Pudd tries to kill him, and half the people he questions end up being murdered.
Parker seems to know a huge amount about Biblical materials and literature - which I didn't feel prepared for by the character. He's also seeing more ghosts, and other characters can tell he's seeing them. Of course, it's his story, but the leaning seems more toward the marvellous than the uncanny.