Carnies (2006)

Author	Martin Livings
Publisher	Lothian Books
Length	322 pages
Genre	Werewolf
Blurb	A dark and stunning thriller
Country

Talk us through it

David Hampden is a journalist on the way down. His contacts have moved on, he's doing copy for the weekend glossy, and his wife is caught up in the spiral of her own success. A possible revival occurs in the form of a lead indicating that something isn't what it seems at the Dervish Carnival in the sleepy town of Tillbrook. David drags his down and out brother Paul to Tillbrook as he needs a photographer and Paul is a gifted amateur who could have turn professional.

While investigating the carnival, nice old fashion fun there if you like freaks, geeks, and the like, David and Paul uncover a nest of lycanthropes. Adding to the Bros troubles are a bikie gang out for revenge, and the local concerned citizens council who have had about as much of the carnival and it's workers as they can cope with in seven lifetimes. The Brothers will discover a dark secret about themselves as Tillbrook looks likely to drown in blood.

The howling in the woods is getting louder and it looks like nothing is going to silence it!

Review

During the course of Carnies's 322 odd pages we are introduced to an Author making the journey from the short story form to the full length novel. Martin Livings may not have reached journey's end with Carnies but he is a heck of a long way toward his goal. This isn't meant to indicate that Livings has jettisoned the short story format completely, he actually has a number of new tales coming out in 2009, notably from Brimstone Press. I'm pretty much salivating like one of his wolf creatures over fresh meat at the prospect of getting my grubby paws on them. But enough of my future reading material back to the talons at hand.

Livings writes in a sort of Stephen King style, thankfully without the "realism" King overloads his books with.

Of course this isn't to say that Carnies is an overly simplistic novel that can be read and discarded in an Airport lounge. Martin Livings has some new things to add to the lycanthrope mythology, with a couple of ideas being not only intriguing but completely new territory to those of us versed in travelling wolf country. The writer also keeps the reader on his/her toes with some plot twists and turns that you wont see coming. The added sauce to this home baked meal is the shifting alliances amongst the various groups depicted within Carnies pages. Livings characters aren't static, a fault of many a horror novel or movie, but change as their circumstances lead to new possibilities. While the Author isn't overly concerned with making a sweeping social statement his characters do convey themes that you will pick up on if you read between the lines. Whether or not the author intended that is of course for Martin Livings to know and University Professors to ponder on.

One thing I noted during a second reading of Carnies, yes it was that good and I was bummed there wasn't another couple of hundred pages or a sequel available to me, was just how well crafted the plot was. The Author has taken time out to actual plot his novel rather than writing in a white hot flush and simply letting things happen. Nothing is coming at you from left field and there are no plot devices thrown in simply because Livings had written himself into a corner. There's nothing that puts me off a novel quicker than a device being introduced to get the hero/heroine out of a bind that was previously unmentioned.

A tin of silver paint that seems thrown into the story randomly during the first half of the novel will come to have special meainging toward the end of our quest for answers. Nothing is introduced into Carnies simply to pad out the page requirements.

This being a horror novel involving werewolves the Author of course throws on buckets of gore as one would expect. There's nothing exploitative involved here, Livings isn't out to titillate the reader, but the potential reader should be aware that Livings goes slightly Clive Barker circa The Books of Blood as the plot requires. I can dig that in a core horror novel and if it works in the context of plot etc then let that claret flow baby I'm there.

Perhaps the only fault I could find with Carnies was a slight lack of the chill down the spine during the course of reading the book. This might be due to Livings giving his werewolves human traits in amongst the pack behaviour and of course having a few characters on the turn. It's pretty hard to get the scare quota happening when the reader is intimately aware of the motivations of the creatures that are meant to supply the chill factor. The prologue piece, which would have stood as a short story, certain heads down the track into creepy town so Livings can provide the shudders when he wants to.

Carnies impresses as a debut novel and one wonders what Western Australian writer Martin Livings may have in store for us in the future. If his first novel is anything to go by it's going to be well worth waiting for. Livings provides us with a horror novel containing lashings of claret, if that makes any sense, but furthers the reader's enjoyment by adding some suspense and just the right touch of madness at the edge of town. It's not a novel you are going to work out midway through and you are going to be reading right through the last paragraph.

Martin Livings book was published as part of the ill-fated Dark Suspense series from Lothian that delivered us exactly four novels before corporate shenanigans once again ensured the local horror lit scene would miss out. We hope to cover the other three books in the series sometime in the coming months, as judging from Carnies we are on a winner here.

Final note: loved the pun in the title "Carnies", "Carnivores".

[Editor's note: While Lothian Books have gone the way of the dodo you can still score up a copy of Carnies from most good book stores. For foreign readers, and I guess locals as well, we'll try to find an online source.]

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