(published by Harvill Secker)
"You had it coming!"
What more can one say? Stuart Neville is a force to reckoned with. With accolades from the likes of James Ellroy, Ken Bruen, and John Connolly, Stuart Neville must definitely has it coming.
After reading THE TWELVE, I learned the true meaning of "sooner or later everybody pays". I know I did. I paid by not being able to sleep until I had followed the alcohol fueled, insomniac driven crusade of former paramilitary killer Gerry Fagan and the twelve ghosts that haunt every moment of his life. From the flesh eating Ulster Freedom Fighters to the dead mother and her baby, Fagan carries the memories of these victims with him like the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they :
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
Nor rot nor reek did they :
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
An orphan's curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high ;
But oh ! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man's eye !
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
Neville has brought together the wonderfully, horrid witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the ghosts in James Lee Burke's timeless classic In The Electric Mist of The Confederate Dead, and those of M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense to life. Throw in the stark brutality of Belfast as seen in Colin Bateman's Divorcing Jack and you are left with a masterpiece.
Which leaves one saying, "when will the next Neville be coming and please make it soon!"
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