Charlie ("Bird") Parker is a private investigator operating in Maine. Once an NYPD cop, there are enough references to gruesome past events to let you know that if this is but your first foray into Parker, then really you've been camping out. On the face of it, Parker is an engaging, Chandler-esque PI whose world teems with perky survivors. "The Jews, they've had thousands of years of experience of bearing grudges. They are to grudges what the Chinese are to gunpowder," one character tells him. "If there were any flies on him, they were paying rent," Parker says of another.
This is not, however, just a series of horrific crimes leavened with smart dialogue. Because of Parker's devastating personal experiences, John Connolly's gumshoe has been absorbed by the mechanics and provenance of evil and of the damned. More, the very personal nature of Parker's past loss (his wife and daughter were murdered) allows him to be at times conscious of the dead as they wander, lost, among us. The result is to create, rather than just a linear story, an atmosphere in which bizarre events may take place.
These events involve Parker being retained to investigate the death of Grace, a young woman who appears to have committed suicide. At the time of her death, Grace was completing her post-graduate thesis into a 1960s religious cult, the Arookstook Baptists. The cult disappeared. Now Grace is dead. Parker is soon up against subterranean forces whose chosen method of killing their victims may be judged from the prologue, in which a woman's mouth is filled with palp-twitching black widow spiders and then taped up.
"I hate spiders, always have, ever since I was a boy," one character tells Parker. And so say all of us. Just as spiders creep up through the plug-holes of baths and the bends of toilets, so do John Connolly's grotesques crawl out from "the honeycomb world" - the world which lies just below the surface of the real world - "you must be careful where you step . . ." - to drag their victims back down and suck them dry.
The creatures which slink from the honeycomb world "live in pain, and exist only to visit that pain on others. A random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, s enough to give them the excuse they need". This is chilling. Like spiders, evil lurks in the cracks and nooks of our everyday existence.
Despite the number of pots John Connolly must keep on the boil as the story unfolds, the insect theme is intensely maintained. Parker's chief foe, the appalling Mr Pudd, is a human spider. The atmosphere thickens with danger as the stakes are raised. As John Connolly plunges ever deeper into the underworld of the damned, the reader, with eyes of slits, must cling on for this brilliantly terrifying ride.
Peter Cunningham's new novel Love in One Edition has just been published by Harvill