by Kerry Hadley-Pryce
SYNOPSIS
Guy Flood, returns to the Black Country with his girlfriend, Alison, to attend his identical twin brother's funeral. The reasons he left, and the secrets he left behind, slowly become clear. A chilling dark fiction, dominated by unknown and all-seeing narrator.
REVIEW
Guy and Alison are travelling back to Guy's childhood home for the funeral of his twin brother. He left home in difficult circumstances and has stayed away ever since but now Alison will have the opportunity to find out why. Whatever happened in Guy's past has had an taken it's toll on him and his relationship with Alison, and the details are beginning to surface...
God's Country uses an incredibly unusual removed style of narration, told in the present and future tense at the same time. The story is being told second-hand looking back at every minute of Alison and Guy's trip to the Black Country, and as the reader, we are being told what Alison will say about the trip in the future with the benefit of hindsight. This creates a real sense of unease as it feels like the narrator is reporting back about the trip because something bad has happened and we just don't know what that is yet.
The tension throughout the story is created and builds because we are given the idea that Guy has done something terrible in the past that he has wanted to hide from. We think Alison knows what he has done and we are just waiting for the information to be released. Every page you read, you are wondering if this will be the page where we find out what he did, or if it's even worse than Alison was led to believe. This, together with the style, was very disconcerting. It's really hard to describe the feeling you get when reading this story but there is just something that seems off constantly, making it totally unnerving to read.
Unique, bleak and claustrophobic - God's Country is like nothing I've ever read before but be warned... this may be a short novel but it is definitely not a light read!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kerry Hadley-Pryce was born in the Black Country. She worked nights at Wolverhampton petrol station before becoming a secondary school teacher. She wrote her first novel, The Black Country, whilst studying for an MA in Creative Writing. She is currently a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University, researching Psychogeography and Black Country writing. God's Country is her third novel.
Thanks to Kerry Hadley-Pryce - @Kerry2001 Helen Richardson - @RichardsonHelen and Salt Publishing - @saltpublishing for the opportunity to read and review.
Publisher: Salt Publishing Genre: Literary Fiction / Literary Horror
ISBN: 978-1784632656
Pages: 160pp
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