Review: The Chalk Man
The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor
My rating: [usr 1.5]
Blurb:
In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy little English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code; little chalk stick figures they leave for each other as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing will ever be the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out his other friends got the same messages, they think it could be a prank … until one of them turns up dead. That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
Review:
[I originally received a copy of this book through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review. It just took me ages to get to it.]
Kinda OK in terms of the storyline, but this is one of the books that felt “I’m going to like it” in the beginning, and in fact… Well, no.
The 1986 parts were more striking in my opinion than the 2016 ones, perhaps because of the whole dynamics involving kids living their last summer before leaving childhood and becoming teenagers, drifting off from each other… only not completely, never completely, because of that one last tie, that one thing they discovered together and that filled them with horror.
From there, I was hoping that the 2016 arc would see them get together and come to grips with the “evil from the past”, so to speak, but… let’s be honest, that didn’t happen, not really, apart from a few scenes with Ed meeting his chums at the bar or taking the train to have coffee once with another of his former friends. So, the 2016 narrative plodded its way along and wasn’t the thrilling ride I had expected.
The mystery part has a few turns and twists, with Eddie’s dreams/visions blurring the boundary; he may or may not be affected by the same illness that took away his father; or having had an actual hand in the misdeeds committed; and while these plot points were somewhat of the expected kind, they still worked at the moment they happened. Still, I found that the beginnings of plots threads that I found exciting fell flat in the end, and rested on clichés clearly present to elicit some sensationalism (the casket, the dog, the character who gets blamed and commits suicide, the coat at the bottom of the wardrobe, etc.). It may have worked in other circumstances, other stories. Not here.
I had a beef, too, with the issues that were tackled throughout the story. The abortion clinic part was accurate enough—all it takes it to look at the daily news right now to see that the same hypocrisy about the whole “pro-life” movement is here and strong as ever—but the question of abuse (sexual and otherwise) was frankly not dealt with well. There’s one assault in particular that just gets dismissed as “it wasn’t so bad”, and seriously, are we still on about this? It is ALWAYS bad. And it doesn’t only happen to girls, or to people who “look like they deserve” it, or whatever other crap the rape culture continuously feed us.
The ending didn’t work for me either. When the actual culprit is revealed, it just feels like it’s coming out of nowhere, and is quite unbelievable. The way it looked to me, there were all those threads about hidden horrors that suddenly needed coming together, and so were tied at the last moment into something that didn’t make that much sense.
(Also, I may be mistaken because I haven’t read these books in 25 years or so, but quite a few scenes were reminiscent of older King novels, and I couldn’t tell whether it was simple homage, or pretty much the same scenes in a different writing style.)