Having loved everything by Gillian Flynn and preparing myself to dive into Sharper Objects, I thought I’d work my way up to it with a suspense novel by another author and C.J. Tudor’s The Chalk Man has been getting a lot of high praise on Good Reads so I chose this to break up my non fiction addiction until LAPL‘s copy of Flynn’s novel became available.
The Chalk Man was an all around engrossing read, but not quite as unexpected as the reviews made it out to sound – that or I’ve just enjoyed too many thrillers in my life. While I found it predictable, I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Of course Stephen King loves this book, it brought back a lot of memories from reading It and watching “Stand By Me” (which after reading this makes me want to finally read The Body for which it was based upon).
Our narrator, Eddie, vacillates between present day as a teacher and 30 years prior as a child in the same neighborhood and house where he lives today. Adult Eddie has taken on a roommate, a young woman who just moved to town, to help pay the many mortgages his mother took out to help with his fathers medical bills.
One day Eddie receives an image of a Chalk man, something he hasn’t seen since childhood and takes him back to the day when he and a friend found the body of a girl they knew in the woods. From here we begin the jumps backward and forward with quite a bit of precision. The story does become somewhat It in nature, down to the one red headed girl the three other boys have as a friend.
Without spoiling anything – and I do rather recommend this if it’s slipped by you and you’re into suspense – everyone plays their part both in the death of the young girl they found in the woods so long ago or in covering it up.
To a degree, this also felt very 13 Reasons Why, again because of how well each other characters stories wove together to reach the climax of the story. If anything this is a really great road trip or book club pick. I did find myself wanting to chat this through with someone at several points.
