Synopsis
When Jodi, BB and Matt decide to burgle a derelict country home as a thrilling dare, they become embroiled in a twisted legacy of supernatural terror. There are rumours of a bizarre curse hanging over the hoard of antiques and jewellery within the house. And unbeknownst to the others, one member of the trio has darker motives for breaking into the property.
Lem is a brutal man obsessed with a gruesome family legend. He is determined to right the wrongs of the past and lift the curse placed on his bloodline. By completing the work of his father and bringing a bizarre selection of scattered relics back together, he hopes to be free of the malign influence that has hounded every generation of his family for two centuries.
Across a single day a deadly pursuit will culminate on the desolate, storm-swept Crow Island, and those involved are given cause to wonder… can believing in a curse deeply enough bring its own bad luck?
Review
Some authors are content to spend their entire careers essentially rewriting the same book over and over. Much to his credit, Tim Lebbon is not and of the handful books of his I’ve read each has felt wholly distinct from one another. He’s an author equally at home with media tie-in properties, like his Alien or Firefly novels, as he is with his own original ideas. He’s an assured storyteller unafraid to push himself into new arenas and genres with works spanning the breadth of the speculative fiction domain.
His latest, Secret Lives of the Dead, veers sharply toward the crime thriller end of things, with only a small nod toward his horror roots. In the book’s opening pages we’re introduced to Jodi, BB, and Matt, close-knit friends who have been sold on a minor adventure by Jodi to break into the long-abandoned manor that has become the subject of local gossip and urban legend revolving around a familial curse and a long-dead witch. It’s not just the derelict home that’s keeping secrets, as Jodi has her own reasons for starting their day off with some light B&E. It’s not long before the situation spirals out of control with the introduction of the heavily tattooed and psychopathic killer Lem, who arrives at the estate looking for the very same artifact Jodi is covertly seeking.
One of the hallmark characteristics of the thriller genre is its rapid-fire pacing. Secret Lives of the Dead has this in spades and speeds forward like Usain Bolt. Spread across only a single morning, Lebbon keeps the action tight and frenetic, with the plot unravelling across what is essentially a very long chase scene across the fictional setting of Mariton in the UK. Mariton’s a fitting place for all this, sounding a bit like marathon, and with the author being a triathlete with a love for endurance sports. Secret Lives of the Dead is itself a marathon run, and these characters’ endurance is pushed well beyond any of their limits.
Lebbon slows down sparingly to shade in his character’s motivations, answer reader’s questions about them, and link them together via a series of flashbacks. Even then, he still manages to maintain a sense of violent dread, particularly with Lem, who has no tells or other outward signs to indicate what his reflexively violent reptile brain might do next. Lem’s encounters as he searches the country far and wide for the artifacts to break his family’s curse offer those he comes across one thing, but could quickly derail into something else entirely. A small, insignificant conversation with Lem could lead to a quick, brutal, and unexpected violent clash in a heartbeat. He’s emotionless, remorseless, unflappable, and horrifying in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh. Unlike Chigurh, Lem doesn’t leave the fate of his potential victims up to a coin flip as much as he does his own whimsy, which often leans toward murder because that’s just Lem’s natural instinct. We also understand Lem more than we do Chigurh, even as he repulses us. He has his own motivations for doing what he does, even if he comes across as a more thuggish Terminator.
Jodi, too, has her own motivations and reasons for keeping secrets from her lover, BB, and his best friend, Matt. She’s a survivor of Lem’s traumatic actions and Lebbon fills in the blanks well enough to make us understand her viewpoint even if it is disagreeable and leads to numerous unintended consequences that stack one atop another in an out of control death spiral.
As for the horror elements, well, Secret Lives of the Dead is, first and foremost a kinetic crime thriller. For all its talk about witches and curses, the artifacts driving and pushing Lem and Jodi into conflict are a straight-up MacGuffin. Swap those out with drugs, money, or a briefcase with a glowing gold interior, and you’ve got a straight-up crime story. Make them the bones of a witch, throw in a couple gnarly moments of extraordinary violence, mutilation, and/or dismemberment and, presto-change-o, now it’s a horror thriller. With a few adjustments, Lem and Jodi could have been motivated by literally anything else. Lebbon keeps the line separating bad luck from a curse paper thin, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions on the validity of these characters claims. Wondering how much of the narrative is supernatural versus a series of poor, rash decisions made on the run is like wondering why only Christians get possessed by the devil.
The real horror, though, comes through the characters themselves. Lem is, inarguably, a human monster. Jodi less so, although her propensity for keeping secrets results in monstrous repercussions. Who needs witches when you have characters like this?
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