I have a T-shirt which I bought in a coffee shop called Java Joe's on Exchange Street in Portland, Maine. On the back there is a dog wearing dark glasses and drinking coffee. With this there is the advice "Avoid The Ordinary", a motto which John Connolly certainly must have followed with his first book, Every Dead Thing, an instant bestseller, and now Dark Hollow, his new thriller, which is bound to follow in its footsteps.
Writers are always advised to avoid coincidences since no one believes them in fiction, even though they happen all the time in real life. In my own current novel, the heroine drops into Java Joe's for a coffee at one point, so you could have knocked me down with a Danish when I found the hero in Dark Hollow doing the same thing. In fact, come to think of it, the two of them might well have been there at the same time.
But back to the plot. Dark Hollow, like its predecessor, is a headlong plunge. The bullets start flying on page 13, and from then on the action doesn't let up. The protagonist once again is Charlie "Bird" Parker - a former New York detective, not the famous musician. (Oddly, no reference is ever made to the name thing, so the point is somewhat lost; he might as well be called Charlie Haughey). Parker is joined along the way by two pals from Every Dead Thing, the gay hitmen Angel and Louis, who as usual have all the best dialogue - you can just hear Samuel L. Jackson speaking it - and as soon as they appear you suspect that the death toll is going to be high. And it is. The only book I've read lately with a bigger body count was Stalingrad.
Parker, grieving over the murder of his wife and child in Every Dead Thing and recovering from all the other nasty things that happened in that book, is living in his home state of Maine and rebuilding his life, making ends meet with a bit of private-eye work. When a woman who has been a client is murdered savagely along with her young son, the hunt for a killer begins. Very quickly Parker finds that he is by no means the only person on the trail. In fact, the murders are the signal for the greatest collection of weirdos to emerge since Michael Jackson's Thriller video.
And as if that wasn't enough, the Mob get in on the act as well.
Connolly's bad guys aren't just bad, they seem to seep evil from their pores, which may account for the fact that they smell a bit off. When Parker first meets one of them, the man has the odour of "earth and blood, the stench of rotting meat and stale animal fear that hangs in a slaughterhouse at the end of a long day's butchering". Nice. Other characters are similarly grotesque. A man looks "like lard poured into a flexible, vaguely human-shaped mould and left to set", while a woman has "make-up so thick you could have carved your initials into her face without drawing blood".
Connolly's strength is not so much his characters or the way they are bounced around by the pinball-machine nature of his plotting; it is the way he conveys menace. Maine is good territory for that, and in Connolly's hands, the forests drip with dread. Add to that a touch of the supernatural when our hero starts to have spooky visions and you have Stephen King meets Elmore Leonard.
But Connolly is not an easy author to pigeonhole. He is his own man: an original and exuberant story-teller, as he proves once more with this enjoyable book.
Keith Baker's new novel is ENGRAM.