I’m really enjoying reading/listening to the Stephen King Holly Gibney books. This one starts with a small town police officer investigating a horrible child murder where the DNA of a local well loved baseball little league coach is all over the crime scene, but he also has a rock solid alibi for the time of the murder.
I was somewhat impatient with the first part of the book because I was waiting for Holly to appear, as she was the reason I wanted to read it, but she did eventually, and since she had been through an experience with a supernatural evil entity, she was able to gently open the minds of the investigating team to the possibility that something spooky was going on.
I know there are lots of people who don’t like magical realism, or supernatural elements in stories, arguing that it’s not real therefore stupid. I actually really like that in the world of fiction we can bend the prosaic rules of what is real and introduce magic. I don’t believe any magical stuff in real life, but I do in stories. After all, fiction is all about ‘what ifs’. I don’t think that introducing supernatural elements to stories belittles the realism – I read books about serial killers knowing that almost certainly (and certainly hopefully!) I will never experience these situations in my real life, but it’s a way of vicariously working through fears and I can wholeheartedly enter into the spirit of things as a reader, and the same is true of supernatural stuff.
Will Patton is a great narrator on the whole, although I don’t love his portrayal of Holly Gibney’s voice as very stilted with unnatural pauses and emphasis. I think females on the autism spectrum are generally good at blending in (hence why autism is much more underdiagnosed in females) and that Holly would be able to talk more naturally, but that is only a small peeve and I do think he is very good other than that.
Sarah Wray Writer 