Fellside

My pre-read notes say “Apparently, it's all a surprise, but the author of the Girl with All the Gifts wrote a book NPR describes as ‘[a] supernatural fantasy [that] reads like a marriage between Stephen King and Charles De Lint, with a touch of Orange Is The New Black...'” And, yeah, that's basically it, with a few quibbles: I would describe this as Orange Is The New Black, with a touch of De Lint and Stephen King, rather than the other way around; and I think this book is really hurting itself with the “it's all a surprise” shtick.

Let's start with the un-spoiler-y parts: this is a good book. This is an important book. Those who turn their noses up at speculative fiction don't understand that at its finest it takes a simple question of “what-if” and uses that to deeply explore humanity, our existence and modern living in ways that “literary fiction” cannot. And that's what Carey did with this book: he took the biggest issues of the ‘10's – for-profit prisons, the opiate crisis, human trafficking – and added a tiny “what-if” to cast a new and thought-provoking light on them. And, I guess this is where I'll spoiler tag, although I encourage you to keep reading, because as previously mentioned, I think trying to guess the “mystery” impedes the reading of Fellside.

The what-if is this: what if the protagonist can see a ghost. That's it, not that there are ghosts, or lots of people can see ghosts. One little trait of one main character that really shifts the entire narrative. Through the ghost, who Jess originally thinks is her victim, but who turns out to be Nasreen, a former inmate, Carey gets the chance to say a lot about what it means to be a criminal and what it means to be a hero. One of the core themes of the book is exploring the myth of a "lost-cause" and how by fighting for this ghost, Jess becomes a champion and, in turn, inspires other characters who have given up on themselves. Carey also has a lot to say here about how our current incarceration system inevitably causes recidivism by presenting impossible dilemmas of continued criminality versus victimhood. What I liked the least about Fellside was the ridiculous commitment to mystery. It was abundantly clear to me from the beginning that the ghost wasn't Alex, but was Nasreen and to have the narration pretending otherwise was distracting. In addition, I felt like letting the reader in on that secret would help give insight into Jess' state of mind and the lies that we tell ourselves to try to heal ourselves.

Overall, I could easily see this book ending up in a high school English class curriculum, exploring the interplay of speculative fiction and contemporary events. (I kind of want to write that five paragraph essay now.)

I still love you, Mike Carey, but I just can't with this. I felt like I'd been reading forever, only to discover there were still 337 pages to go!

I kept waiting for the setup to end and the real plot to get going, only to realize that this was mostly going to be a drama about corruption and brutality in a prison, not a ghost story. The actual ghost story has an intriguing hook at the start, and then goes pretty much nowhere. Flipping to the end of the book shows me that the big reveal for that storyline is exactly what I figured out in the first two chapters.

If you're interested in a grim realistic story of prison life, layered with a kind of spiritual journey, this may delight you. I came for a ghost story, and I'm leaving early and unhappily.

Carey is such a good storyteller. This was an absolute page-turner, especially in the last half.

This could almost have been one of his Felix Castor stories, but I'm glad it wasn't. I loved that most of the main characters were women, and especially women doing bad things, my favorite genre.

I was intrigued by the spirituality theory expressed in the book which seems to be that dreams and the world of the dead are very close.

It's not as unique as The Girl with All the Gifts. A lot of the story used prison and drug addict clichés that I've seen in other media. Also, some of the characters were unrealistically stupid and self-serving in order to build tension. (Or maybe I just have too much faith in humanity.) These minor criticisms didn't diminish my enjoyment of the book.