Beware the Crooked Man

John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things found its way into my hands by accident – I’m leaving my job soon, and so was rummaging around for stray personal effects in my desk when I found it in a drawer. There’s every possibility that I put it there, but I have no idea when or why I might’ve done that, so I feel rather like it found me instead of the other way around. I suppose when you consider the nature of the book, that’s probably appropriate. 

Although I have been known to like a good fairy tale, I think I’ve more or less grown out of the medium in its various forms and appropriations when it comes to full length novels. An Angela Carter short story here and there, sure, but I’d rather not spend a weeks’ worth of lunch hours reading about Little Red Riding Hood, despite what she might have to say about the state of modern feminism, or whatever it is authors appropriate fairy tales for these days.

With that preamble, then, it surprised me just how much I enjoyed this book.  Connolly tells the story of a David who, after the death of his mother, finds himself living a solitary life in the vast country home of his new stepmother, with only his books for company as his father dotes on his new stepbrother and devotes most of his waking hours to working as a code breaker for British Intelligence. Naturally, David stumbles into a twisted fairytale land and becomes trapped there, facing sinister threats at every turn. Like all good heroes, David not only has to discover his courage and intelligence, but he must also interrogate his own dark whims and pride, and decide what he is prepared to sacrifice in order to get his old life back.

All fairly standard stuff, I suppose, but I loved Connolly’s uncompromisingly gruesome approach to fairytale retellings. I won’t give too much away, but my favourites were Little Red Riding Hood, who fell in love with a wolf and gave birth to the first Loup, a bloodthirsty mutant that is half wolf and half man; and the huntress, who traps children and fuses their heads on the bodies of animals, so that she can hunt beasts with human cunning and animal strength and speed.  It’s all quite dark and nasty, and so it should be. It might not be anything too new, but a fairytale isn’t a fairytale without a few good beheadings, infanticides and disruptions of the natural order, after all!