Muriel Gray

Found this one hard going. Lots of over the top nastiness and very obvious developments: for example, you know from early on that the husky dog is not long for this world. Quite a nice twist that, in the flashbacks, the minister is not a bigot, is actually trying to help the native Canadians against the other white men, but there is also a lot of stereotyped stuff about native Canadians being alcoholics and wife/children abusers etc.

Very prevalent head hopping within scenes - an especially bad sequence is when two characters are skating downhill together and 'he' is a different one from sentence to sentence so it is almost impossible to understand - and a lot of characters who are set up to do something - the longsuffering resort deputy is a main one who keeps popping up - but in the end come to nothing (literally in his case as he's present at a scene of major mayhem but you don't even find out if he's killed). Another one is that the story starts with three railway man in a train together - a lot is made of one of them having had a bad experience before in the railway tunnel so you think he is going to be the hero and then he is completely dropped after the first chapter.

The conclusion is also very unconvincing - how on earth does the hero stay out of jail when there is no evidence of his innocence that would be accepted by any of the police other than the one who helps him and his family, but who is already marginalised by the other law enforcement officers. As I believe the US version was edited down from this UK edition I've read, I wonder what material was taken out and whether that would make it a better book, but as it is, I can't say I enjoyed it.… (mais)

Ms. Gray used to be (is?) a television and radio presenter for the BBC. I remember her in the good old '80s on The Tube trying to make the likes of The Jam and Sigue Sigue Sputnik behave for British telly viewers. Anyway the multi-talented Ms. Gray turned her hand to horror novels for a bit and Trickster, the first, is probably the best of the trio she wrote. Muriel is from Scotland but that didn't stop her from taking on a novel set in Alberta, Canada and largely based around native Indian folk mythology and trying to make it all believable and entertaining. I thought at 707 pages this was going to get dull somewhere with all the minutiae involved but it never did. The suspense was maintained throughout.

The characters were where the writing excelled. The author presented great depth and empathy in a large cast of characters. The novel had a lot of flashbacks and these really presented a novel within a novel, particularly the 1907 interludes, were almost as important and suspenseful as the "main" contemporary story line.

I'm not big on North American bogeymen like the Wendigo but the adversary here, the Trickster, is every bit as menacing as Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror. The menace is of the older than old type so it predates all mythologies and is sort of susceptible to all sorts of exorcisms but in our modern scientific times few remain who know how to trick the Trickster so to speak. Sam Hunt, who denies his Indian heritage, is going to have to step up big time if anyone is going to get this thing back in Pandora's box. But he has his young son, an old drunk, his wife, and a skeptical police officer to help so this should be no problem. Oh and there is the blizzard of the century to deal with as well.

Well at least he has a better chance of getting the jin back in the bottle than Scottish preacher James Henderson does in 1907. Someone keeps letting this guy out!

Be careful with editions here. The icy cover is a greatly edited version of the novel. The real deal is the big fat green covered paperback.… (mais)