Soon by Lois Murphy
I would like to thank Lydia from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Titan
Published – Out Now
Published - £7.99 paperback
On winter solstice, the birds disappeared, and the mist arrived.
The inhabitants of Nebulah quickly learn not to venture out after dark. But it is hard to stay indoors, cabin fever sets in, and the mist can be beguiling too.
Eventually only six remain. Like the rest of the townspeople, Pete has nowhere else to go. After he rescues a stranded psychic from a terrible fate, he’s given a warning: he will be dead by solstice unless he leaves town – soon.
Horror can be a magnification of our daily fears. A fear of what is after death leads us to ghosts; why we should not go into the woods at night brings us various monsters but a fear I also remember reading about is that feeling of being stuck. That’s when your life feels like you’ve reached a point you can’t change any further – not essentially despair and a desire not to continue but one where every day feels the same and you can’t escape or find a way to change it. For the remaining inhabitants of Nebulah in Lois Murphy’s supernatural tale we find characters stuck in a nightmare they also cannot find a good enough reason to escape but eventually time will catch up with them.
Welcome to Nebulah a small remote Australian town which on the Winter Solstice saw mysterious vehicles and men drive through the village and then to the cemetery before they vanished. Then each night afterwards a mist descends on the town that can scream; resemble the dead and tear bodies apart. When the story starts Nebulah has been and gone through the news cycles and is more a curious urban legend; the vast majority of the population has left (or been killed/mysteriously vanished) and we are down to six inhabitants who have all decided to stay. Each night the locals spend time together to avoid the siren calls of the mist. Everything has been this way for weeks and their numbers are slowly declining as people all crack under the pressure and seek a life outside the town or possibly from everything.
What I really liked about this novel was the sense of eerie isolation the book has. A town without birdsong or children or noise; these people who are trying to deny what they know is happening and just trying to live and failing at it. The whole story is narrated by Pete a retired policeman a man who has embraced this life of not having to care about what outsiders think hence unkempt hair, daily drinking and long toenails. But he does have a close bond with his friends Milly and Li and an uneasy alliance with the remaining local criminal Stick as well as a couple that live on their (and get on everyone else’s) nerves. It’s not a pressure cooker in the sense of people turning on one another through stress but more a group that enables each other to not face the truth by instead blaring the news or their records at full blast to drown out screams from outside. Murphy presents slow build-up of something clearly evil outside that everyone fears but doesn’t show it straight from the start so our imagination naturally makes it worse – you just see these mature(ish) adults all acting strangely and everything feels more wrong for it. When the mist does strike what it leaves behind makes you very glad you never see it.
The obvious question is why stay and the answer the book provides is that these people have no where else to go. Milly is widowed and fears the spirit of her husband is inside the mist; Li lost everything in the Khmer Rouge purges of Cambodia and refuses to give up yet another life and as wee see in a number of flashbacks Pete was never an easy guy to live with – his connections to his ex-wife and daughter are all gone. In some ways Li and Milly are now the substitute family he’s needed. Its always tempting to say ‘well of course I’d run’ but here we have the elderly and the poor being left behind by the state – we can see people that in our real world do live in various disaster zones so it feels true that there would be some who are forced/decide to take a calculated risk every night rather than try to start anew when they have very little already that may be just too scary for them. Instead they just hope that they are always lucky in their protection arrangements. Here a broken window or a car battery really can mean life or death and that adds a nice level of tension to the story so that when the mist lets rip it really does seem a malevolent power biding its time and lulling people in.
My one issue was that the story seems to take a left turn in the final third with the unexpected addition of several new characters from outside. They’re quickly introduced and placed in jeopardy for Pete to decide if he should deal with it and while that section has some good scares this didn’t feel the same flow as the rest of the novel and perhaps a slightly lower stakes ending would have been more suitable. Nevertheless, by the end of the book we’ve learnt to care for these people and their lives are ones we care about and so the finale really does make you tense to see can Pete and co finally move on? Murphy plays with our emotions by raising and smashing our hopes several times.
A good horror story needs an emotional pull and Murphy’s writing and understanding of characters really made me invest in this small group and will their survival and dear what would happen at night. I love the unusual setting of an Australian town and it’s middle aged but still defiant population trying to deal with the supernatural. I strongly recommend it if you fancy a tale to read as the sun comes down and the wind or possibly something else starts to moan in your ear.
