Dave's Book Blog: "Burnt Out" by Jon Neal

Monday, 9 December 2024

"Burnt Out" by Jon Neal

Mysterious things happen and nobody is quite who they seem to be in this tense psychological thriller.

Tom's life is falling apart. Despite his childhood trauma, he has a wife and two kids. He lives with them and his brother, returned after a long period missing, in a ramshackle house on the edges of an Australian town. But since then the family has been unlucky. A gruesome discovery was followed by Tom's disappearance for a few days and he is now haunted by something he can't remember. He struggles to get his life back on track; wandering around the town to find clues to the gaps in his memory. Is a sinister someone behind the odd things that keep happening? Or is he being paranoid?

Or is he being gaslighted? If so, by whom? The obvious suspect is his spouse - and she has secrets. Or could it be his long-lost brother, now returned? Or the reclusive lodger? Or his uncle who also happens to be his boss?

This is an author who is able to extract the maximum threat from the everyday interactions of outwardly normal people. His use of conversational ambiguity reminded me of that classic of madness and menace, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, whose inner frame is also told in the third person but from the sole perspective of the protagonist. There were moments (such as when Tom goes to the Office in chapter 9) which I read with bated breath. The nail-biting tension was palpable. I read as quickly as I could and yet I didn't want it to stop.

Selected quotes:

"What is forged in the fire can never really be undone." (Ch 1)
"Who wouldn’t kill for a home and family like this?" (Ch 4)
"The papery trunks of the forest surrounded the rural property like an army of soldiers waiting for battle." (Ch 8)
"The venetian blinds had the air of razor blades about them." (Ch 9)
"I think I’d been so focused on the gloom that I hadn’t dared to pick up a torch and tried to find a way out of it all." (Ch 10)