How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder by Emily Soderberg

The house somehow managed to fit in with the air of soullessness that marked the entire subdivision, and yet be uglier than its neighbours. Built of beige stone, it sprawled in all directions, more like a corporate campus than a personal residence, although I’d never seen a corporate building with turrets…

…A white woman in late middle age answered the door after a few seconds. If I described her outfit, you might get the wrong idea about her. She wore a pink sweatshirt, very pale blue jeans, and white sneakers, and had a white windbreaker tied around her waist… something about the absolute spotlessness of her clothes, the subtlety of her make-up, and her air of complete command meant she gave off an intimidatingly well-put together impression. Like an elementary-school principal all the kids are scared of, but out walking her dog on a Sunday.

So begins the mystery of the grieving old dog in the mansion full of rude rich people who seem to spend all their time gravitating around a kitchen island.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder is the debut novel by Emily Soderberg. The novel follows a very eventful fortnight in the life of Nikki Jackson-Ramanathan: struggling pet behaviourist who relies on part-time bar work and selling crafts on Etsy to make ends meet. That is until she receives a very generous offer to walk the dog of a wealthy family, who is seemingly grieving the loss of its owner. Within days of meeting the family the old woman who hired her ends up dead, and Nikki finds herself a suspect alongside the rest of the dysfunctional family.

The novel is a quirky locked-room murder mystery that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It felt very much like I was watching an episode of Monk. It also felt reminiscent of films like Knives Out, following the theme of a spoilt rich family dealing with a murder in the family home. The characters are all distinctive enough, their personalities, relationships and potential motives all casting them in ambiguous light. The peripheral characters, such as Nikki’s friend Ruby, provide some variety in locations, allowing Nikki to become a bit more well-rounded as a character. I also really liked that the book was set in St Louis, which was also the authors home town. I’d like to imagine that some of the people in the author’s neighbourhood have been included in some way.

I found Nikki at times to be a bit of an insufferable character though. It was a really interesting contrast to see how negatively she thought of her over-friendly new neighbour, McKayla, while at the same time she seemingly injected herself into the lives and home of a twice-grieving family without thinking anything else of it. I had to keep reminding myself that she’d only known the van Meer family for a few days before making a daily habit of asking intrusive questions and sneaking around the house for clues. Her obliviousness to the inappropriateness of her involvement in the case verged on the absurd. I know, suspend disbelief etc but if your grandma dies you’d probably ask the dog walker to stop coming around and walk the dog yourself?

On the same tangent I found it a bit of a stretch that she was doing a better job than the police of working the case. It just felt a bit convenient that she had a best friend with a true crime obsession, a husband that studied law, and another friend who was a practicing lawyer. I kept thinking the end of one of her internal monologues would finish with ‘and everyone clapped.’ I think this could have worked better if she had been an experienced pet psychologist and there was a lot more time and energy leaning on her relationship with animals. Like… Ace Ventura: Pet Detective meets Cracker. Given the way the mystery developed and eventually resolved I think this may have been a more gratifying way for the story to have progressed.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder would probably also have benefited from tightening the prose a bit. Nikki nodded at someone or something over 20 times throughout the novel, three times on one page. Nobody needs to describe that much nodding. Sentences and paragraphs were at times overwrought (both the quoted paragraphs above are twice as long in the book). Self-corrections and stream-of-consciousness writing have their place, but I feel that crime novels need to be a bit more sparse, generally.

Gripes aside, this was easy enough to read, and the revelations of the crime at the end were satisfying, it felt like all the details were there and I didn’t feel like I’d been rug pulled. As I said earlier, thematically this felt closest in style and approach to an episode of Monk. This would be a great weekend read for someone who’s into the lighter side of crime fiction.

This was a free review copy of How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder. Thanks to Crooked Lane Publishers via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication on October 21st.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder is available for pre-order from UK Bookshop.org. UK Bookshop donate 30% of the cover price to an independent bookshop of your choice, or 10% to an earnings pool that is distributed across participating bookshops each month.

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

I haven’t heard from my real mother in months, not since an email she sent last October asking to talk, but Nightmare Mother, Ghost Mother - always there in Mama’s absence - texts me now. Children, the message reads, I miss your screams. Come play.

Never satisfied bringing ruin once or even twice, Nightmare Mother sends the message several more times. The text bubbles stack on top of the next like blocks in a toddler’s tower.

After vomiting, I upload a screencap of Nightmare Mother’s threat to my and my sisters’ group chat.

What tf am I looking at, asks Eve.

These texts just got sent to me from Mama’s number.

Okay. But Mama didn’t send those, says Emmanuelle.

I know.

Neither of my sisters says anything more. I shove my phone in my pocket, and the tiny hole in my joggers becomes a big hole. My sisters and I speak daily - we are close - but it’s a closeness that dissolves quickly into loathing on my part.

I don’t tend to read reviews of horror books before reading them (and yet here I am writing one), largely because a) I don’t want to be told its the scariest most troubling book ever and find out its fairly basic stuff, which ruins my day the same as a stand up comedian that isn’t funny; and b) when books are purported to be a mindfuck or have unexpected twists and turns its nice to be surprised. Having said that, I wish I’d read a few more reviews of Model Home before picking it up because I went in with all the wrong preconceptions.

Model Home is the fifth book by Rivers Solomon, an American non-binary author of speculative and literary fiction who describes themselves as ‘a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.’ I went in completely blind to this book, having been drawn in by one of those instagram spooky horror recommendations that my algorithm insists on throwing my way. The cover certainly sealed the deal, and I am unfortunately someone who very much judges a book by their cover (as must publishers because why else go to an effort to make enticing designs). Before getting into the book itself I’d like to take a moment to raise a glass to ceara elliot, who’s designed a cover that both evokes that sort of blocky 1970’s cool while also feeling quite modern.

The book itself follows the story of Ezri, their siblings Eve and Emmanuel, and their daughter Elijah. Ezri and Elija travel home after family become concerned that nobody has heard from their parents, who still live in their childhood home in a gated community in Dallas, Texas. Their parents are found dead in the back garden, in what was assumed to be a murder/suicide. The children feel differently though, and are forced to reckon with their difficult, traumatic childhoods to try and unpack what actually happened to their parents.

Model Home can be summarised as a meditation on how people deal with severe trauma. I had inklings of where the plot was going to go, but have to say it became somewhat irrelevant roughly halfway through, even with satisfactory explanations (and probably one of the few scenes of what someone might traditionally consider ‘horror’) by the book’s end. The book is more about how emotionally damaged people try to recover, and try to avoid letting similar traumas happen to the next generation. In that sense I think it’s a really effective journey, and certainly by the end all of the earlier events, flashbacks and recriminations made sense.

I was to an extent reading this on a back foot, as I was definitely expecting more of a psychological thriller, haunted house, spirits and dark forces, inexplicable malevolence, etc. but in truth the dark forces are real, relatable, almost more the world of a social worker or a psychologist than a parapsychologist. So on reading the first two thirds or so I probably didn’t get as invested in the book as I could largely because I thought I was reading a different kind of book. I usually try and avoid books that focus on trauma and difficult childhoods, I don’t find the experience of exploring this in a fictional sense particularly cathartic or enjoyable.

All that being said, Rivers Solomon does an excellent job of portraying very imperfect characters. Arguments are frequent, warning signs are swept under, vulnerable people are ignored until its too late. I had a lot of empathy for the children of Mama and Pop, (as they are referred to). Seemingly all of the children and grandchildren have names beginning with E, which is explained in the novel, but does make it quite difficult to follow. I really related to Ezri’s struggle to transcend her experiences and to avoid another cycle of suffering for Elijah, and again it resonated that such as struggle was fraught with obstacles and falls. Some parts felt a little bit over egged - Ezri is at pains to list all of her mental health and personality disorder diagnoses - it felt a bit showy and I would rather have seen such descriptors come out another way.

Model Home’s other theme, which really sits in the background like the darkest of shadows, is the racism that Ezri’s family faced for decades. They were the only black family in a gated Texas community, privately educated and determined to show that they belonged there as much as the white families. The racism they experienced was low volume, oppressive, coercive and incredibly cruel, and without spoiling anything it became the entire axle on which the family’s trauma cartwheels span.

The end of Model Home is incredibly effective at bringing together the previous 250 pages, explaining pretty much all the strange goings on, the evil entity of Night Mother and in the process making Ezri so much more of an empathetic character.

Although I found it a difficult read at times, it sends an important message about the importance of kindness, and never truly understanding what other people have been through.

Model Home is available in hardback from all good booksellers, including Pages of Hackney Please buy books from independent shops as much as you can!

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Holding in both hands an open book three or four centimetres in thickness took a greater toll on my back than any other activity. Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its pages; being able to maintain a reading posture; being able to go to a bookshop to buy a book - I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded that its participants meet these five criteria of able-bodiedness. I loathed, too, the ignorant arrogance of all those self-professed book-lovers so oblivious to their privilege. Pain shot through my heavy hand, which my bent neck could only just about support. With the forward incline of this reading posture my lower back, arced so as to crush my internal organs, lost its tug-of-war contest with the earth. Each time I read a physical book, I could feel my backbone bending a little further.

Hunchback is a gloriously transgressive, angry, funny, filthy novella. It packs an incredible amount into its slim 97 pages, following the story of Shaka Isawa, a young Japanese woman with severe spine curvature, who is confined to living in a wheelchair as a resident in a care home owned by her late parents, spending most of her life attached to a ventilator via tracheostomy as she lacks the muscle strength to breathe for herself.

Shaka has all of her needs seen to by the care team at the home, and spends most of her time online, or writing fictional reviews of massage parlours and brothels.

On the site I work for, the most successful combination among male users is first-hand accounts of various adult entertainment venues or lists of top-twenty pick-up spots, together with dating and hook-up apps, while among women, it’s lists of the top-twenty shrines to pray at for rekindling romance, together with adverts for psychic hotlines.

Shaka is paid about 30,000 yen for each article, and combined with a series of erotic novels she has authored under the pen name Sakya, Shaka makes a reasonable income which she donates almost entirely to foodbanks or to anonymously pay for student's university education. Her later parents bought the care home she lives in, so Shaka wants for nothing, other than fantasies of living a normal life, most of all to have sex. Shaka finds out that one of her carers, Tanaka, may be interested for a price.

I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion

I can’t imagine a foetus growing properly inside this crooked body of mine.

I guess I couldn’t withstand labour either.

And of course, taking care of a baby would be out of the question for me.

But I could get pregnant and have an abortion like anybody else. There’s no issue with my reproductive functions.

So I’d like to experience what that’s like.

My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman.

This passage is really the essence of Hunchback - Shaka wants to have a normal life and experience all of the privileges that most able-bodied people take for granted. It’s beautiful in its straightforward approach to shattering taboos. It’s important to say clearly that for all the offence that some people may choose to hold, the novel is not poking fun, or utilizing shock for the sake of it. The anger drips off the pages, and it forces the reader to reflect on how society treats disabled communities. In a sense it reminded me of The Sellout by Paul Beatty in its ability to be both hilarious and rage-inducing at the same time.

Hunchback is Saou Ichikawa’s first novel and won major book awards in Japan. Ichikawa has congenital myopathy and uses a ventilator and an electric wheelchair, and was the first author with a physical disability to win the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s premier literary award. It’s also been longlisted for the International Booker Prize, which is how it came on my radar. It has been translated into English by Polly Barton, who some might recognize as the person behind the translation of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter.

Much of the anger and body horror in the pages of Hunchback clearly comes from lived experience. This is not a novel which pokes fun at the disabled, if anything it lays bare the disenfranchisement of disabled people in modern society. At times the novel could just as easily read as a long-form essay, but this is not intended as a critique on my part. There are really important messages within Hunchback, delightfully mixed in with some absolute filth.

I picked up my copy of Hunchback from Foyles, and read the whole book in one sitting while sat in an Emergency Department waiting room vomiting blood after a curly fry got stuck in my gullet. Felt like an appropriate book to enjoy under the circumstances.

Homesick by Silvia Saunders

I’m sent back to London with a multipack of dishcloths and a bottle of Glen’s vodka. I am restless on the train, shifting around in my seat, unable to concentrate on my book or my Zodiac Killer podcast. I unlock and lock my phone. I go to the bathroom twice, once just to clutch the edges of the sink and stare in the mirror. Me and Tom haven’t exchanged a single message all weekend. I have endless things I want to say to him, and at the same time nothing.

Back in my seat, I watch as the couple sitting opposite me hold hands in various ways. They interlock fingers, first in one direction, then the other. The woman makes a fist around the man’s thumb, twisting her fingers round and round it. They admire the way the two hands look together, hold them up to the light to better see them. They briefly let go, before touching the pads of their fingers together, one by one. I wish they were both dead.

I have known Silvia since our Goldsmiths’ days, and I’m so happy she’s the first of my pals to get a book out. Honest to god she’s a funny cow and she deserves it more than most others. I remember her work focused on the horrors of being a female in mid-twenties, her stuff always carried the sort of discomfort you’d get from the likes of Peep Show or Camping with a strong female perspective (yes, I know, Julia Davis).

Silvia not only picked up a Comedy Women in Print Prize, she also picked up a much deserved publishing deal with Harper Collins. Homesick is her first published novel and its a doozy.

[ok from this point on I should probably be professional and refer to Silvia as Saunders as though this was a Guardian/Goodreads book review.]

Homesick follows the story of Mara, who unexpectedly comes into an inheritance from her dad, giving her the chance to buy a small property in London, finally escaping from the rental market. She wants her boyfriend Tom to move in, but Tom is preoccupied with working as a newly qualified teacher and suffering from fairly intense depression. Tom needs his home in Birmingham, while Mara tries to make a home for herself with a young couple incessantly shagging upstairs, and an awkward, antisocial neighbor below. Mara’s dealing with a shaky romantic relationship with Tom (who some days struggles to even get out of bed), a strained relationship with her best friend Noor, and navigating the creepy interests of her boss at the library Derek, all while trying to figure out what home means to her.

I read Homesick in two or three sittings, the last half of the book devoured during one train journey. The short chapters at first made it hard to engage with, some of which are only a page or even a paragraph long. I felt myself resetting myself each page rather than getting stuck in. But once I had the tempo of it down it really sucked me in, and was an effective way of showing how time passes, how seasons and people change too. I initially really disliked Tom for his apparent selfishness, but was impressed how over time Saunders manages to encourage empathy for his illness and I came away understanding what Mara saw in him.

Most of the unlikable characters in Homesick have facets of likability, which is a hard thing to pull off. Especially when creeps like Derek exist. There’s a lovely twist at the end regarding Jerry, Mara’s downstairs neighbor. It was really left field but also felt like an authentic slice of East London life. People too often don’t appreciate the intricate and interesting lives of people living just below them. I liked that Mara made the effort to find that out. Tom and Mara’s relationship also develops in a convincing way, and it felt refreshing to come away from a book feeling like there wasn’t really anyone worthy of disdain, other than maybe Baz, who was a twat.

Homesick is also really funny. I mean it won a comedy prize so it ought to be at least a little bit. Much of the humour permeates through as awkward interactions, things mis-spoken, comments off-target, delivered with a straight face and a hidden cringe, which is stuff I know Saunders excels at, so was happy to see much of it survive the editor’s axe. My favourite part was when Mara had to attend to a fainting, grieving, pregnant woman and all she could think to do was soothingly spoon her Ambrosia custard. It was a definite highlight of my reading experience, and worth the admission fee alone.

Homesick is available now on Hardback, Paperback and Audiobook. Why not pick up a copy from an independent bookshop like Pages of Hackney

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

It was all fatboy’s fault, that’s what he would tell them. It was all because of Franco Andrade and his obsession with Senora Marian. Polo just did what he was told, followed orders. Fatboy was completely crazy abotu her, and Polo had seen first-hand how for weeks the kid had talked about nothing but screwing her, making her his, whatever it took; the same shit over and over like a broken record, his eyes vacant and bloodshot from the alcohol and his fingers sticky with cheesy powder, which the fat pig only ever licked clean once he’d scoffed the whole jumbo bag of crisps…

The conclusion of Paradais by Fernanda Melchor is clear from the very first page. Two teenage boys want something, from the big mansion next door. Polo, a school dropout working as a gardener in a gated community wants money and infamy, and Franco - a lonely, overweight, porn-addicted rich kid wants Senora Marian. Over evenings of drinking themselves stupid, the boys become more frustrated with not having what they feel entitled to and hatch a terrible, violent plan.

This is the second book by Melchor translated into English by Sophie Hughes. The first, Hurricane Season, was a brutal exploration of violence against women, revisiting the murder of a local witch from multiple perspectives. Melchor painted the hopelessness of poverty, of social standing, and of male violence in black and red. While I found Hurricane Season incredibly empathetic and vivid, it was undeniably horrific in its refusal to shy away from the ugly truth of violence. I was taken by Melchor’s ability to evoke empathy for characters who were barely deserving of any.

Paradais stylistically follows a similar imprint to Hurricane Season, sentences are hurried, urgent and seem liable to overflow from the slight 120 pages. Some paragraphs go on for pages at a time, sentences bleeding into each other; an onrush of violence, misogyny, hatred, sadness, anxiety and shame coming at the reader full pelt with very little downtime.

Polo is the main protagonist of the story, Melchor is at pains to portray him as sympathetic, to an extent. The working-class men of Paradais seemingly have two employment opportunities: either the soul-crushing underpaid jobs that humiliate them as much as they benefit their rich bosses, or working for the narcos and all of the violence and trauma that comes with it. Polo sleeps on the floor of his house, using a dirty t-shirt for a pillow while his older, pregnant cousin sleeps in his bed. Polo is in awe of the narcos and dreams of becoming a gangster like his other cousin, Milton (who himself was kidnapped and forced into terrible acts after seeing his friends killed). It wasn’t lost on me that the complex Paradise shares the name of John Milton’s most famous offering, Paradise Lost, which focused on themes of free will and transgression.

One way Paradais differs from Hurricane Season is in the scale of the story. The locations and characters inhabit a smaller world, and from the start Melchor makes the terrible end destination of sexual violence clear. It feels much more like a close character study of Polo and to an extent Franco as well; their aimless, nihilistic little lives, both choosing extreme violence as a means of escape from the drudgery of existence. The final scenes of Paradais are both explicitly rendered as well as terrifyingly real and human. Reality that had sat with the reader for the entirety of Paradais seems to finally hit the two boys in the final act. What was meant to be a carefully planned act of evil transgression turns into a chaotic, alcohol-fueled home invasion, murders rendered even more horrific and terrible by their meaninglessness.

For all its vivid violence and sexualised language Melchor manages to beautifully compartmentalise the narrative. We understand that we’re following Polo’s troubled thinking and mindset, and in doing so we’re afforded a chance to empathise with the unempathisable. I’ve read several reviews about Melchor’s work and how it orbits the world of violence against women, but I think it almost does the opposite in that it really orbits the world of violence committed by men. I understand that despite Sophie Hughes’ expert translations, some of the complexity of language has been lost in translation from Spanish, as Melchor is known for using wordplay with Mexican dialect and vernacular.

I find it a hard book to recommend to a general audience because there is a great deal of triggering language and imagery burned into every page. But I think there are some really important insights about gender-based violence and perceptions of modern Mexican society for those who are prepared for a challenging read.

Review - The Cabin at the End of the World

Leonard says, “Before you go inside to get your dads, you have to listen to me. This is important.” Leonard crawls out of his sitting position and onto one knee, and his eyes brim with tears. “Are you listening?”

Wen nods her head and takes a step back. Three people turn the corner onto the driveway: two women and one man. They are dressed in blue jeans and button-down shirts of different colors; black, red, and white. The taller of the two women has white skin and brown hair, and her white shirt is a different kind of white than Leonard’s. His shirt glows like the moon, wheras hers is dull, washed, almost gray. Wen catalogs the apparent coordination in how Leonard and the three strangers dress as something important to tell her dads. She will tell them everything and they will know why the four of them are all wearing jeans and button-down shirts, and maybe her dads can explain why the three new strangers are carrying strange long-handled tools.

Leonard says, “You are a beautiful person, inside and out. One of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, Wen. Your family is perfect and beautiful, too. Please know that. This isn’t about you. It’s about everyone.”

I’d heard a bit of a stir around Paul Tremblay, in particular about his novel A Head Full of Ghosts. As is always the way you can never find the book you wanted to check out, but another novel by him called The Cabin at the End of the World was on display in Foyles and seemed interesting, so I thought I’d give it a try (who said point of sale tables don’t work).

The book starts intriguingly enough, a young girl named Wen is playing outside in a grass field while her adoptive parents, Eric and Andrew, unpack their things into a small cabin in New Hampshire. A large man comes up and starts talking to Wen, shortly after 3 more people follow, all armed with brutal looking medieval weapons.

What follows is a story that mostly plays out in the front room of the cabin. The four strangers, who had never met each other before that morning other than via online chatrooms, are convinced that either Eric or Andrew must voluntarily offer themselves up as a sacrifice, or the world will end. The strangers supposedly have had nightmares showing them what will happen if this doesn’t happen. Obviously, both Eric and Andrew are convinced these are homophobic maniacs and actively struggle against them. Meanwhile the television in the background peppers the action with news bulletins show stories of floods and other disasters, spurring the strangers on even more in their belief that either Eric or Andrew must die.

The premise is interesting, but its written in a fairly ham-fisted way. Each chapter is written from the perspective of Wen, Eric or Andrew, and their thought processes and internal monologues are prosaically recorded on the page. I feel this would have been an excellent, thought provoking short story on the spectrum of belief vs bigotry, but what we have instead is reading over each character deciding when to loosen their ropes, or whether to rugby tackle or kick someone in the leg. It felt like a philosophical conversation you might have over a beer translated into people getting smashed in their torsos with hammers.

More than anything, it read like someone wanted their book to be transcribed into a screeplay. The whole thing felt very readable, very cinematic. It felt like the sort of thing that would fit better as an 80-minute film. I did not know at the time, but was unsurprised to find out it had in fact been made into a film. It probably works better that way.