This review was originally published on Goodreads on 17/09/2022
The further I go through Peter James’ pre-Roy Grace horror novels, the better I’m finding them to be. Whilst the first one I read was a touch generic, he has been developing his ideas and characters in the genre as he goes. “Twilight” felt like another step forward, particularly as it was based around Brighton, where he would make his fortune with Roy Grace.
As a young boy, Harvey Swire had an out-of-body experience when he was knocked off his bike and ended up in a long tunnel speaking to his recently deceased mother. After the accident, he finds he has similar experiences, some of which he has control over, which help him cheat in his exams and get into Medical School and once he has graduated, he finds another doctor with an interest in epilepsy and certain chemicals which may be able to induce similar effects.
Years after Harvey’s accident, there are stories that strange sounds have been coming from the grave of a recently buried woman. A local journalist, Kate Hemingway, manages to insert herself into the exhumation and what they find suggests a huge mistake has been made somewhere along the line and there may be a conspiracy between the hospital and the local undertaker, as everyone is denying that Kate has seen the evidence she did.
There is something additionally chilling about “Twilight” in that most of it seems horribly plausible and it features characters you can engage with. A doctor and a local journalist are people who are within reach of the average reader, as you’ll likely have come across them, or at least their work. The beaten up old car Kate drives adds to the realism and whilst some of the ways she inserts herself into parts of the investigation seems to be stretching things a little, this is a very familiar type of story and reminds me of the kind of urban horror Christopher Fowler writes so well.
In so many novels, the characters are not relatable and spend too much time doing things that normal people with normal salaries couldn’t hope to do. In this case, very little of that kind of thing happens and they don’t mix in circles that normal people wouldn’t. Harvey is an unpleasant, but believable teenager and then a self-obsessed doctor and Kate is occasionally out of her depth both financially, emotionally and professionally.
“Twilight” was the best of Peter James’ early novels I’ve happened across so far and given the improvement I’ve seen in reading them in publication order, I’m hopeful that this may continue. I may not have been impressed with the earlier ones, but whilst they were a touch cliched, they weren’t that bad to put me off entirely and the perseverance has paid off and with several novels still on my list to read, I’m confident they will continue being good reading.
sohoblack 