#c.j. tudor

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Richard at the Sevenoaks Bookshop in the UK. (October 14, 2023) 4

📷: foreblohn

[bangbangwhoa]

books I’ve read in 2024 📖 no. 051

The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

“Soon, we may live in a world where they are nothing more than a legend."

[litandlifequotes]

That was the problem with scared people. Ultimately, they became more dangerous than the thing they were afraid of.

A Sliver of Darkness by C.J. Tudor

[suspirocotidiano]

Achamos que queremos respostas, mas o que de fato queremos são as respostas certas. É a natureza humana. Fazemos perguntas esperando que nos digam a verdade que queremos ouvir. O problema é que não podemos escolher nossas verdades. A verdade tem o hábito de simplesmente ser a verdade. A única escolha que temos é a de acreditar ou não nela.

O Homem de Giz – C.J. Tudor

[books-and-cookies]

5 SECOND REVIEW

[freshlybrewedbookreviews]

"They were chanting a lot of stuff about love but they seemed full of hate."

C.J. Tudor (The Chalk Man)

[lifesarchive]

THE BURNING GIRLS by C. J. TUDOR (REVIEW)

quickly: a woman of the cloth relocates to small-town England and uncovers a long-kept community secret. (single mom with a repressed past and a rebellious teen daughter / creepy blair witch stick dolls / ghostly apparitions / family secrets turning into community secrets / rich men controlling local government / a random spree killer).

quaint, quiet English towns are some of the most dangerous places on Earth. this is what The Burning Girls confirms in a story that feels like the UK version of a Fear Street novel. the chapters are short and quick, often ending with a cliffhanger. ‘good vs. evil’ and ‘nature vs. nurture’ are major motifs in this story, sometimes stereotypically so, sometimes uninspired. i wish there was more thrill and horror… with the lore behind what a ‘burning girl’ represents, there was the potential to go so much further. while i love the author’s tone and style, the substance lacked.

★ ★ ★

more thoughts: SPOILERS!

Some personal context… I picked this book out based on a search I did for ’theological horror’. I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to read the non-fiction book “Heathen: Religion and Race in American History”. As I’m already reading a non-fiction book on Indigenous American history, ”Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America”, and I just completed the lengthy “The Books of Jacob”, I was hesitant to read another lengthy non-fiction book.

My thought process was… I can soothe my horror itch and my religious history itch by reading a book that combined both. If the book was intriguing enough, then I’d move on to Heathen by Kathyrn. I found several books that fell into the theological horror genre, and ‘Burning Girl’s’ was a newer one, so I picked it. Sadly, it did not inspire me to reach for non-fiction theological history. While not bad, it didn’t capture what was interesting about the religious lore of Sussex England that the title and cover art so openly refer to.

The title is what truly caught my eye: THE BURNING GIRLS. That, paired with the promise of uncovering church mysteries, pulled me in.

The story opens with Reverend Jack, short for Jacqueline, who is being informed that she is being relocated to a distant Sussex community after an unfortunate occurrence at her church in Nottingham. Essentially, she wasn’t able to save an abused child from their parents and was partially blamed when the parents murdered the child. 

She moves to Chapel Croft with her 15-year-old daughter, a small village where everyone knows everyone, and her arrival is big news. Immediately, both mother and daughter have separate encounters with appearances of ‘burning girls’, ghostly apparitions who appear to be on fire, and missing bodily limbs. Reverend Jack is coincidentally informed that the creepy stick dolls everywhere are to commemorate the girls and families burned during religious wars back in Olde England. She’s also informed that seeing a ghost of a burning girl is a warning of impending danger.

As the story goes on, Revered Jack’s back story is unfurled. She comes from an abusive home with a psychotic spree-killing brother who is responsible for the death of her husband (who was also a pastor). Just before her move, she was informed that her brother was released from prison. While she thinks she is evading him by moving to Chapel Croft, unbeknownst to her, he is ruthlessly and methodically making his way to her and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

All the characters are dealing with some form of ‘good vs. evil’ struggle, most evident in Reverend Jack’s brother, who seems to have a voice within that he compels him to do evil deeds. There are also several references to the great question of whether or not people can be born bad, and what it means to be bad vs. being a good person doing a bad thing. To be honest, the word count could’ve been better spent exploring the wild history of the burning girls. 

Anyways, fast forward past two girls who went missing long ago being discovered in a well, the dead body of a missing priest being found buried under the church, a devious teenage boy found living with the dead body of his mother, and that same boy plotting the killing of Revered Jack’s daughter simply to please his equally devious killer girlfriend. Oh yeah, I forgot, did I mention that randomly, in the background of the main events, Reverend Jack’s brother has been traveling the countryside on foot and killing anyone who crosses his path?

The story ends in the loud gory cacophony of noise and violence that most B-level thrillers tend to end in. The psycho-killer teens confront Revered Jack and her daughter in the church for the big climax, which results in Jack killing the teens, and the church being set on fire in the process. At the last moment, just before Reverend Jack is engulfed by the flames, her psycho-killer brother rescues her. The people he killed to get to her kind of fade into the background as if his character’s sole purpose was to represent the bad person who does a good thing (in contrast to Reverend Jack being the good person who does a bad thing).

The miasma of “Good and Evil” that this story exists in is muddier than it is inspiring. Too many angels and devils in this garden if you ask me. And again, the gem, the burning girls, barely get any page time! Three stars. Not horrible, but not anything I am compelled to recommend. That said, I’d still love to try THE CHALK MAN, by this author, and give her another chance.

[reader00s]

"Pessoalmente, descobri que é muito melhor pegar nossos medos, trancá-los em uma caixa bem fechada e guardá-los no canto mais profundo e escuro da mente. Mas cada um sabe de si."

O homem de giz, C.J. Tudor

[middleofrow]

Book Review: The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

Continue reading Book Review: The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

[good-books-to-read]

Cool Cover Monday

Title & Author: The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

Summary: In a small Alaskan town a young boy is found with his throat ripped out and drained of blood.

Eerily this echos a case from 25 years ago, the town believes it the local vampire colony that live deep in the mountains.

Out of Towner Barbara Atkins dosn’t think this is the case, for one the evidence dosn’t add up and this town is hiding more than one secret.

As the snow and bodies piles up and the days shorten, time is running out.

Link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/44fbc27a-8c4e-4fcd-90aa-f892b7126491

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Richard at the Sevenoaks Bookshop in the UK. (October 14, 2023)

📷: sevenoaksbookshop

[jolieeason]

Top Ten Tuesday: Quotes from the last ten books I have read

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Every Tuesday, a new topic is assigned from the schedule below. Then, you take that topic and fly free with it. You can do as little or as much as you want to (I have…

[mylifeinfiction]

The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

"Seems to me that devils really do walk among us. . . only they're not vampyr."

C.J. Tudor's The Gathering isn't just 'meh', it's the absolute worst kind of 'meh'; a 'meh' that thinks it has something truly interesting to add to its genre. The painfully smug moral superiority in which these pages are soaked is so damn boring that it drains every single ounce of promise this admittedly exciting premise ever had.

Seriously, what could've—should've—been an atmospheric mix of Mare of Easttown (I immediately cast Kate Winslet at Det. Atkins) & Midnight Mass (the interactions between human and 'vampyr' should've been terrifying) quickly proved itself to be a tone-deaf sludge of True Detective: Season Four (whose only saving graces were Jodie Foster and those quickly abandoned The Thing vibes, early on) & the worst parts of early True Blood (I don't think subtlety is in Tudor's repertoire). I was really looking forward to this one, too. What a bummer.

Humans were like a plague. They infected everywhere.

3/10

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

[suspirocotidiano]

Ter princípios é algo bom. Se você puder bancá-los. Gosto de pensar que sou um homem de princípios, mas, no fim das contas, a maioria dos homens acha que é. O fato é que todos temos um preço, todos temos botões que podem ser pressionados para nos levar a fazer coisas que não são de todo honradas. Princípios não pagam a hipoteca nem quitam nossas dívidas. Princípios são uma moeda sem valor na rotina do dia a dia. Em geral, um homem de princípios é alguém que tem tudo o que quer o não tem absolutamente nada a perder.

O Homem de Giz – C.J. Tudor

[delightful-to-be-read]

The Burning Girls - C.J. Tudor

TW: Child abuse, suicide

I read Robert Harris’s Enigma in the middle, but couldn’t make it a square to cross off and also didn’t have much to say about it. When I’m tired, I tend to fall into a pattern of reading thrillers, as it takes so little effort to focus on them.

The three perspectives are a first person POV of a vicar who’s been removed from a troubled area of Nottingham to a country parish due to a terrible event. Then two third person POVs: Their daughter, a teenage photographer who’s impressively at-one with herself and a dangerous unnamed antagonist who’s sleeping rough.

Early on, you discover that the church and parish has a chequered history. Two girls vanished from there several years before. The previous vicar killed himself and the current one is issued with an exorcism kit on arrival, without explanation.

Things I Noticed:

The Queer discourse comes from a more primitive place than I’m used to in the books I’ve been reading recently, but that makes sense in the context.

Again, the first person thing. I don’t know if other people are less bothered by it; I think maybe they are. It’s not the over-familiar thing that makes book unreadable to me. It’s more an article-written-for-the-school-newspaper jauntiness. I think what I want is police interviews or diary entries

Things I like

There’s some very deliberate challenging of gender assumptions.

“I don’t think cruelty is inevitable.”

I’m a city person who is mistrustful of the countryside. I know the slowness of rural movement is not always an accurate trope and therefore I have been stunned too many times to be dropped into a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, ableist, transphobic conversation that doesn’t even seem to be a political conversation, but part of everyday casual conversation. As the countryside is so often represented as the idyll, I do like to see a different reflection.

Things I’m not sure about

There’s a detailed, fictional account of a very serious child protection failure within a Black family. This happens, of course - I suspect that one of the most famous serious case reviews was the inspiration for it (although under current regulations it could still happen). As you’d expect, London being a majority-white city, the majority of safeguarding issues I deal with are with white families. Of course, a proportion are with Black families, as you expect, London having a proportion of Black families. But I just have an uneasy feeling that race is unduly significant in that part of the narrative. Considering, you know, the only other actually identified Black character has two sentences then death.

[freshlybrewedbookreviews]

The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

I really enjoyed this vampire mystery. Combining two of my favorite genres (supernatural and mystery) was awesome, and unlike anything else I've read. I wasn't surprised that I enjoyed this read as much as I did, as I haven't forgotten Tudor's The Burning Girls since I read it a few years ago. Tudor is one of those authors I look forward to reading, and I'm excited for the next one.