"Wild Houses" by Colin Barrett

A thriller written in such wonderful prose that it must qualify as a literary novel. 

An innocent young lad is kidnapped because his elder brother hasn't paid a drug debt. The owner of the safe house, Dev, where the lad is kept has moral qualms about what is happening. And the lad's girlfriend, seventeen year old orphan Nicky, has to try and save him.

It is related from the alternating perspectives of Dev and Nicky. Both have moral decisions to make, a journey to travel. Dev's is perhaps the more challenging: he too is at risk from the kidnappers. Bullied at school, he never fought back. Can he find it in him to fight back now?

The victim is a boy named Doll, young and fresh, the very essence of vulnerability. The kidnappers Gabe and Sketch are men who ooze the threat of violence. And yet, much of the time, as they feed Doll, and let him shower, and find videos for him to watch, they seem kind and thoughtful, even caring. But just under the surface is their unpredictability and this keeps the reader always on the edge of his seat rushing through the pages.

But don't rush too fast. The prose is as fine as in any novel. There are descriptions to die for:

• “Georgie was a tiny, highly strung dog with a candyfloss coat covering a ribcage as fragilely fine-boned as a chicken’s. He had demonic yellow teeth, a wizened rat-like face and a moist, bloodshot, perpetually beseeching stare.” (Ch 1)
• “He was clean-shaven and if it wasn't for the missing runner and the nasty notch over the corner of his eye, he would have looked like any young fella you'd see shaping around the town on a Friday night, punctiliously spruced for the disco; short black hair brushed emphatically forward, and so sodden with rain and product it gleamed like melted tar, the top button of his baby-blue shirt closed clerically at the throat, dark jeans and the scouring bang of aftershave crawling off him like a fog.” (Ch 1) There are so many wonderful moments in this paragraph. 'Punctiliously spruced' and 'scouring bang' are fabulous pairings. The 'any young fella' turning Doll into an Everyman. The use of the word 'clerically' to describe the shirt, summoning and reinforcing the image of innocence. The way that his aftershave 'crawls' off him ' 'like a fog': we've all known young teenage boys who splash on so much cheap scent that it lingers around them.
• “A face on him like a vandalised church, long and angular and pitted, eyes glinting deep in their sockets like smashed-out windows.” (Ch 1) And this is one of the villains and he is represented as something sacrilegious and damaged.
• “The jangling dentition of crockery.” (Ch 7)

Sometimes the author makes comments about characters that are not strictly true:

• “Mothers have powers, and Dev's mother had them all. She was relentless, clairvoyant, could bend her son's will so adeptly to hers it felt like it was happening the other way around.” (Ch 6) But Dev's mother never realised that her son was being bullied at school, so much for her clairvoyance.
• “The Ferdias had the unreliability, but also the dangerous decisiveness, of creatures who did not understand their nature and did not care to understand it.” (Ch 10) But there are moments when the Gabe and Sketch Ferdia show, or at least appear to show, the glimmerings of self-awareness. 

Perhaps these moments are there to suggest that even an omniscient third-person narrator writing in the past tense might be unreliable. 

Selected quotes:

• “There's nothing wrong with talking to God. That's just pleading your case into the air and there's no harm in that, lots of people do that, my own mother used to do that. The trouble begins when God starts talking back.” (Ch 2)
• “The morning sky through the long curtainless window above the sink was as blue and clean as the ring of flame from a gas stove. It looked like the sky of another planet.” (Ch 5)
• “He could hear the shower going. He knocked and Sketch opened the door a crack. Behind him, steam and heat, the clamour of the water hammering the bottom of the tub, the kid's body a smudged pink presence on the other side of the curtain.” (Ch 5)
• “A gull was locked in mortal combat with a styrofoam carton.” (Ch 7)
• “When it came down to it, you were a kind of janitor or superintendent of your body, responsible only for its sanitation and presentation. You fueled it and disposed of its waste, showered it, dressed it. You brushed its hair and you cut its nails. But you could choose not to do these things and your body, regardless of your neglect, would simply carry on for as long as it could.” (Ch 12)
• “That was what made it all so difficult. You couldn't do anything until you did another thing first.” (Ch 12)

Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize 

October 2024; 255 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God