Get Lost (Lost Girls - Andrew Pyper)

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Product:	Lost Girls - Andrew Pyper
Date:	04/04/01 (721 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Original, gripping, memorable and highly accomplished – especially considering this is his debut novel.

Disadvantages: Slightly messy ending.

A first class chiller, this novel, but maybe it doesn’t quite live up to the quotes from reviews pasted all over, at every opportunity. I quite understand why the publishers decided this would be a good thing – Lost Girls is Andrew Pyper’s first novel, and a hugely enjoyable and unusually accomplished one it is, too…

However (hands up, those who were expecting a ‘however’) the reviewers’ quotes are just a little misleading, rather than untrue, so we shall tip our metaphorical hats to them, and congratulate them on having sold this reviewer a copy, at the very least.

You see the way the quotes would have you believe it, this is the most terrifying, heart-poundingly horrifying ghost story ever written. And it is not. Not in the way one may assume, having glanced at the front cover, or peeped inside to read yet more of them. Firstly, it does not get my hyperbolic award for scream inducing fits of paranoia (checking you’ve locked the windows, pausing to wonder if that creaking noise is the soft footfall of a mad axe murderer…). Secondly, it isn’t really a ghost story, not in the truest sense of the genre - the thriller/chiller elements far outweigh that aspect of the story.

None of this is the fault of the author, he can only write his stuff, bundle it together and hope that the reader wont hurl it from a train window, once the publishers have worked their magic and peeled it from the printing presses.

I am afraid that, having read thus far into my review, you may have gained the impression that this novel is unworthy of your attention, that the book featured in the next opinion you read in this section is far more deserving of your cash. If you will just bare with me for a little longer, I hope to rectify that. I just had to get that off my chest, so let us pretend we are starting the review with the next paragraph, and not what has already gone before…

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;Queue various rewinding noises, as supplied by the BBC Bumper Sound Effects CD>

Bartholomew Crane, an enterprising defence lawyer who is more ‘American Psycho’ than ‘LA Law’, is sent deep into the woods of Toronto on his first juicy murder case. The brief is, to defend a local schoolteacher, accused of murdering the two most popular girls in town. A nasty case, and one that has the slope-browed locals up in arms.

Bartholomew, Barth to his friends (of which there are scant few to begin with, and none by the end), sees this as his opportunity to shine, to show his true merit and prove himself to the senior lawyers at the firm he represents. Their official name is Lyle, Gedderov & Associate. But, as Barth tells us, “its name among defence lawyers, court clerks, judges, bike couriers, repeat offenders and Crown Attorneys who work in this town is Lie Get Em’ Off & Associate. The suggestions of the name are clear.”

Indeed they are, and it appears, at first, that Barth will walk the case, have it thrown out of court in a minute. The lying powers don’t seem to be needed, as the prosecuting lawyer has one major problem in this ‘murder’ case – no bodies have been found. The only evidence linking the girls’ disappearance with Thomas Tripp is a pair of muddy trousers belonging to him, and some strands of hair, some blonde, some dark, in the back of his car.

Certainly Tripp doesn’t appear to be a fine upstanding member of the community anymore – since his wife packed her bags and their child up and left him, he has been on the slippery slope to weirdoville. The hundreds of pictures of little girls cut from the nightwear section of a home-shopping catalogue and pasted to his bedroom walls don’t throw a kindly light on the teacher, either. But Barth is confident his client cannot be tried for murder, when no murder has been proved to take place, let alon
e one that he can be linked to.

Here we have the background of the novel, but it appears not to be linked to the very start of it – a beautiful description of a summer’s day, two ‘kissin cuzzins’ and the shadowy horrors that lie, waiting, at the bottom of a lake. This is how we begin, and just as our nerves have started to fray at the edges and we long to know what happens next, we’re cut off and have to start all over again, but this time with our favourite cocaine-snorting lawyer doing the first-person talking.

I found this a little frustrating, and really wanted the book to continue in the style in which it opened, but of course we are supposed to be frustrated, and we will learn more about the mysterious lake as the novel continues. Plus, we now have the added bonus of Barth, whom we come to know inside and out, and watch as his assured, cocky, go-getting belief in himself starts to crumple like a speeded up film of mould attacking a piece of fruit.

It would be fair to say that Barth is somewhat affected by his dour surroundings. He imagines the gargoyles above his hotel’s entrance are watching him; the phone in reception begins to ring off the hook in the loneliest hours of the night. Just occasionally, if he looks without blinking from the corner of his eye, there appear to be two identically dressed girls following him, waving and smiling in their decomposing dresses.

Added to this, his meetings with his client are not exactly what he may have hoped for. Tripp seems locked into an ever spiraling nightmare of his own, and he can’t remember what happened the day the girls, his two favourite pupils, Krystal McConnell and Ashley Flynn, went missing. He jabbers on about hearing voices, about the make-believe games they used to play in the Literary Club he set up – a club that had just two members besides Tripp himself.

All of this may have sent a lesser man scurrying, but
our (anti) hero manages to laugh it off, shake his head and take another breakfast boosting snort to keep him going.

Pyper has some really wonderful descriptions in the novel; some phrases that make you reach for a notepad so as not to forget them. Not only does he do a brilliant job of summing up his characters, but also, he can inject a scene with a clarity we can all respond to.

This is only a tiny example, but I found it was one of those things you take away from a book, one that comes back to you and makes you smile in recognition.

Barth has driven out to Fireweed Lake, the place where Tripp is assumed to have taken the girls and drowned them, or worse:

“Roll down the window and suddenly my ears are filled with a high-voltage hum. An orchestrated layering of clicks and gulps and tweets that together is louder than the car’s engine. Over here. All society of nature calling out to each other, to itself. I’m over here.
…My thoughts are cut off by the idea of a sound just behind me. Turn, but there’s nothing there. A rush of blood past the eardrum. A lick of wind sounding as a whispered name.”

I think this passage really captures the reaction we city dwellers have to Nature when we meet it head on. We stop for a while and wonder at it, tell ourselves how beautiful it all is, how this is what really matters. Yet, before we know it, we’re scurrying through the woods back to the safety of the car park, as the twittering of animals we can’t see and the moaning of the wind conjures up ancient fears of ‘exit, pursued by a bear’.

Throughout the novel, we see how Nature and old fireside stories will beat down the confidence of Barth. Truly, the story is more psychological thriller than ghost story, but it is Barth’s reaction to the ghost stories that we analyse, so that aspect certainly plays its part.

Andrew Pyper’s first nove
l is engaging and remarkable, but it didn’t make me scream or pull up the duvet for comfort against the darkness. It is the creepiness that affects us as we read it, the strange goings on that slowly erode all that we (and Barth) thought we knew. The twist near the end of the story is very well done – not at all brutal and delivered like a hammer blow as so many are. Pyper is far too sophisticated a writer for that, even at this early stage in his career. He knows when to turn up the screeching violin soundtrack, and when to be subtle and let the readers come to their own conclusions.

Perhaps this is why the marketing of the Lost Girls annoys me slightly. This is by no means a pathetic stagy, high-octane, churned out lump of a novel, as so many in this genre tend to be. Those kinds of books always remind me of cheap brands of cola – a sickly jolt to the system that satisfies a momentary craving, but positively not sipped for pleasure or to savour the taste. Lost Girls is more like a delicately blended spiced punch – a complicated concoction of flavours that tastes innocent enough for the first few glasses, but knocks you back when the bile starts to rise in your throat and your stomach begins to faintly churn.

If I have any criticisms, they are mainly to do with the ending, the way the horror seemed to peter out too quickly. When reading it, the ending didn’t exactly sit right with me, if you know what I mean. I wont say anymore, I shall leave you to discover it for yourself, but personally I think the novel should have been edited to cut out the last few pages, or at least tidy them up a little. Perhaps this is the author’s relative naivete, but it feels more like the novel was originally somewhat longer, and the editor trimmed it down to size without the integrity of the author’s original intentions.

However (there’s another of those impish little ‘however’s…) the ending d
oesn’t spoil the overall enjoyment of the story. This is a highly original, gripping novel that will send shivers down your spine and make you think twice about wading out into that lovely clear water in the lake you discover on your holidays.

“Just as you thought it was safe to go back in the water…”

Was that your name, whispered on the wind?

Summary: