A review by monty_reads
Bad People by Craig Wallwork
4.0
There is something deeply unsettling about Craig Wallwork's Bad People. As a horror fan for 30+ years, this is a compliment I can't make often. I'm desensitized. Jaded. Too cool for school. When it comes to horror, as much as I still love it, there isn't much that gets to me anymore.
There's a big reveal toward the end of Bad People, the thing you know the book is building toward, something you hope is going to be as creepy as it seems. When it happened I actually said, "Ewwww" out loud. And with enough volume for my wife to call from the other room, "What's up?"
Bad People got to me.
And here's the really cool thing. Not unlike Lauren Beukes' Broken Monsters, the best thing I read last year, it's a seamless blend of horror and mystery. Because this book is ostensibly a mystery, and that lends it a gravitas I often find missing from straight-up horror that deals in the supernatural. Detective Tom Nolan is on the case of several missing children, and his search for the abductors intersects with Alex Palmer, an author visiting the area to conduct research for his next book. How it intersects is the stuff of spoilers, so I won't go into too much detail, but it involves the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, warped interpretations of religion, and unacceptable uses of kitchen appliances. It's a compelling whodunit, but it's also a disturbing horror story that fully leans into what years of serial killers have revealed about humanity.
Bad People works as well as it does because Wallwork understands that true horror is found in the mundane, horrible acts people do to each other. Hell, it's in the title. I mean, I love Stephen King and Paranormal Activity and all the supernatural creepy-crawlies that have been the stuff of nightmares for eons. But if hell is other people (as Sartre so astutely taught us), Bad People is that lesson brought to life. It's eminently believable. And that's the scariest thing of all.
There's a big reveal toward the end of Bad People, the thing you know the book is building toward, something you hope is going to be as creepy as it seems. When it happened I actually said, "Ewwww" out loud. And with enough volume for my wife to call from the other room, "What's up?"
Bad People got to me.
And here's the really cool thing. Not unlike Lauren Beukes' Broken Monsters, the best thing I read last year, it's a seamless blend of horror and mystery. Because this book is ostensibly a mystery, and that lends it a gravitas I often find missing from straight-up horror that deals in the supernatural. Detective Tom Nolan is on the case of several missing children, and his search for the abductors intersects with Alex Palmer, an author visiting the area to conduct research for his next book. How it intersects is the stuff of spoilers, so I won't go into too much detail, but it involves the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, warped interpretations of religion, and unacceptable uses of kitchen appliances. It's a compelling whodunit, but it's also a disturbing horror story that fully leans into what years of serial killers have revealed about humanity.
Bad People works as well as it does because Wallwork understands that true horror is found in the mundane, horrible acts people do to each other. Hell, it's in the title. I mean, I love Stephen King and Paranormal Activity and all the supernatural creepy-crawlies that have been the stuff of nightmares for eons. But if hell is other people (as Sartre so astutely taught us), Bad People is that lesson brought to life. It's eminently believable. And that's the scariest thing of all.