Synopsis:
Beneath the streets of London, it hungers…
It’s the hottest summer on record and the city is suffering. Prices are high, pay is low. And on one fateful morning five travelers find themselves trapped in a tube car deep in the London Underground.
It will change their lives forever.
By the time they leave the train they will be bound together as witnesses to a single horrific event. Something terrible, irreversible, and monstrous. Something hungry.
But they can’t remember what it is.
On their own, they each begin to experience strange dissociative events. Time gets lost. Friends disappear. Something stalks them in the shadows. They make an unlikely team, but to remember what they encountered that day on the train, they will have to work together. Because now it’s up to them to understand what horror they saw – and stop it in its tracks before it drags everyone else down below.
Review:
It’s not difficult to convince me to read a book- it takes, in fact, approximately one solid endorsement from somebody with good taste and resistance is all but futile. However not all elevator pitches are made equal, and some books are easier sold than others. Let me cut to the chase- “The Burn Line,” by Jonathan Sims is about a gaggle of Londoners, bound together by a trauma that occurred in a carriage on the Underground. The issue is none of them can quite recall what exactly it is that happened during their commute from hell. A hot, sticky, sweat-drenched, subterranean pressure cooker- and that’s just the average trip to Waterloo- Sims’ latest is a claustrophobic examination of trauma and memory, class, UK politics and chronic underfunding of public provisions and infrastructure- and is nothing short of psychological warfare. It’s out August 25th in the US from Poisoned Pen Press, and if you’re in the UK you can read it already, albeit with a far uglier cover- mind the gap.
There are 6 commuters in the carriage on this fateful day, each wrapped up in their own little life, six among millions eaten up and spat out again by The London Underground that day. Elise is starting a new job as a coder, ironically for the Department of Transport. Senyo is a driver for the Underground, on his way home after he injures his leg on the job. Will is a man in finance, Tash is headed home to her satan-like roommate after her night shift and Aaron, homeless and very much unwelcome in the eyes of TFL, is working the line, hoping to scrape together a bit of change. Then the awful thing happens, and changed forever, the six of them… go about their day. But there’s an ashy, flaky film, and a bad smell, and something else sinister that follows them about, and after Aaron loses his friend on the streets to something unnatural, he decides he must find these strangers, and they have to do something.
I hate the London Underground. It’s where personal space goes to die. It’s akin to Dante’s Inferno. I have always preferred the Amateur Transplants parody to The Jam’s original “Going Underground.” ‘So don’t tell me to mind the gap, I want my fucking money back,’ is a sentiment I echo. The sopping armpits to the face, the uncleanliness of the seats, should you be lucky enough to secure one, the delays and cancellations, the inherent bad time that the London Underground is (perhaps as a Northerner, I’m being dramatic) is certainly made apparent in “The Burn Line,” and Sims makes excellent use of all that unpleasantness. The Tube is a creepy subterranean backdrop, and a (semi-kinda) efficient way of getting our characters from A to B, but it’s also this metal artery through which the capital city pumps its people. Up above London is big, parts of it glamorous, all of it expensive, but beneath it everyone is just another body in a carriage, breathing recycled air, all of their individual lives compressed into the same crowded space.
But Sims doesn’t stop with the surface-level horror of the Underground, examining in tandem much larger issues with London, and also the UK, and also the world. Let’s begin with climate change. The oppressive heat isn’t simply there so that our finance guy ends up with sweatpatches- the temperature itself becoming an aspect of the horror- suffocating and claustrophobic, especially with the poor ventilation. It’s the hottest Summer recorded for the UK, and I read this book as The Midlands was burning- it was almost existential. Sims is equally interested in what happens to people, when the temperatures exceed 30 degrees, and are stalked by a strange, subterranean entity. Aaron is the sharpest lens through which to view this- our treatment of others, the provisions put in place, their exclusion of or lack of failsafe for those who need them most. Aaron’s dependence upon lovely Senyo rather than any meaningful infrastructural support brought to mind some awful headlines from during the pandemic, as well as those that emerge whenever temperatures reach dangerous extremes.
Perhaps it boils down to this- the Underground is designed to move millions. It is, for all its flaws, a logistical triumph, a system that carries commuters toward offices, hospitals, schools, appointments, and dinners, each passenger busy and preoccupied with their own anxieties and worries rattling around in their skulls. It’s all too easy to not see one another, to forget to be kind and compassionate, to offer help where we can, and hope to receive some when we need it. “The Burn Line,” is a novel that asks us to look twice.
A sweatbox of a novel, with a truly impressive cast of characters, and a rather resonant reminder at the center of it, should one swipe away the grime and the ashy film and the blood- “The Burn Line,” is yet another magnificent entry into horror from Sims.
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