The Dead Path (2009)

Author Stephen M Irwin
Publisher Hachette Australia
Length 396 pages
Genre Witchcraft
Blurb Do you dare enter …
Country

Talk us through it

After the tragic death of his wife, Nicholas Close leaves his established life in London and returns home to Coronation Drive, an outer suburb in an unnamed Australian City. Besides taking home the sorrow of his wife's death, which may or may not have been the result of Nicholas calling her after he came off his motorbike, he also brings home the ability to see dead people. Nicholas Close's encounters with the dead have a unique flavour to them however, he sees the dead as they are dying, and apparently the dearly departed are aware of his unwanted voyeurism.

Nicholas moves back in with his mom and finds nothing much has changed in his old neighbourhood over the last twenty years. Surprisingly an area of forest, simply called The Woods by locals, has miraculously avoided the fatal touch of the Developers. This isn't exactly good news for Nicholas as his best friend Tristram was abducted and murdered in the woods.

Something evil lurks in the trees, and it is aware that Nicholas has returned. When another youngster goes missing Nicholas realises he must act before more children turn up dead. What can he do against an evil force that is both devious and cunning?

Ready to push through the spider web?

Review

"You're the Halloween child. And a child born on Samhain is said to have second sight." - Suzette

Melbournian wildman Chuck McKenzie recommended The Dead Path to a horror writers list so naturally I had to rush out and hunt down a copy in order to review it. Keep the recommendations coming Bro, The Dead Path rocked the house down and then built it back up. So here's my review, dig on in, then go buy the book.

If I had to do a comparison of Stephen M Irwin's new novel to works you may or may not be familiar with, getting this out of the road early, then I would tend to point to what would have eventuated if James Herbert had of been the author of Stephen King's It rather than King himself. Bare with me here and I'll explain. Irwin writes very much in the technically exact style of Herbert, which isn't to say that The Dead Path is a hard read, on the contrary Irwin let's his novel flow without the Reader being forced to grind their way through paragraphs of meaningless description. The Author allows the words to do the work for him and you can ease your way through the novel without pausing to get your baring. Like Herbert, Irwin grounds his book in everyday characters without needing minor cast members to have idiosyncrasies or overly filling pages with pop culture references. There's the odd brand name popping up here or there, but hey who doesn't spread vegemite on their toast in the mornings.

Irwin blends the very correct writing style of James Herbert with the free flowing naturalistic style of Stephen King to produce a novel that will certainly wake you up in the morning.

Where Irwin swings into the Stephen King neck of the woods is through the imagination of another reality just a step beyond our own. It's only a few minutes through an abandoned water pipe and everyday reality takes a side step into the twilight zone. While not everything floats in Irwin's shadows this makes the fantastic all the more believable. And like the residents of Derry, the folk in Irwin's story have been living with evil underfoot without connecting the dots, or moreover perhaps not wanting to, since colonial times.

Irwin is not satisfied with simply telling a story of modern day witchcraft in the woods of terror, he decided to add a dose more horror into the mix to ensure the reader is kept on their toes. If you suffer from arachnophobia, then you will be checking for eight legged beasties while reading Irwin's prose. Not since Richard Ryan conjured up giant funnel web spiders in the 1997 novel Funnelweb, must have taken a while to come up with that name, have I read an Australian writer managing to plug into the deep seated spider fear a lot of people suffer from. I include myself in the arachnophobia basket by the way. Irwin follows the horror tradition of having the arachnids appear on mass through the course of The Dead Path to at times chilling effect. Unfort no web wrapped victims, but hey you can't have everything down your local woods.

Another couple of aspects of the novel deserve mentioning before we move along here. The actual ending, good horror always needs a twist in the tail, which on first appearance may appear slightly trite and have a "been there read it before" quality, when you think about it nails home the true extent of Irwin's novel. I was thinking back to a certain building, lack of fire retardation elements, and persons not being who we think they were. Or as numerous horror writers have commented, there are good deaths and then there are the deaths you generally find between the covers of a horror novel. The final image stayed with me after I had consigned The Dead Path to my bookcase, both for what had happened during the course of the novel and also for the implications of what might happened post novel timeframe.

Chuck McKenzie may have antagonised Christians with his zombie orientated short story The Mark of His Hands, (from the collection Confessions of a Pod Person reviewed here ), but he is not going to be alone come the Inquisition. Joining Chuck McK on the barbeque menu will be Stephen M Irwin, who takes time to point out Christian adoption of former pagan gods. Irwin mixes in a good dose of Celtic lore, the Greenman, and asks Christians to consider exactly who they have been praying to for the past few hundred years! Irwin in fact pretty much goes with an anti-establishment subplot through the course of The Dead Path, with constant references to the "Greenman" and pointedly making the reader aware the local church and it's servants of god are of no use against the forces of an elder god. Nicholas Close will eventually decide to fight fire with fire, but lacks the experience to be entirely successful. Indeed there's a light on over at the inquisition place. Horror, not sure if I've said this before, once again being subversive and unapologetic to the established order of things.

As a writer Stephen M Irwin is easy to read and the book melts away as you keep reading to get to the next revelation. At no stage did I find anything dragging or wished to skip a paragraph. Irwin seems to be aware of pacing and keeps the plot running at a good clip without getting bogged down in details or spending inordinate amounts of time describing things to the nth detail. The Author writes believable characters and keeps their actions in line with their established motivations. There's nothing left field going down, a plot point isn't left up in the air, and you wont be left wondering if perhaps the book should have been either slightly longer or slightly shorter. Irwin nails an all round excellent horror novel and is a Writer to keep your eye out for.

The Dead Path is available currently from all good bookshops in Australia and should be readily available overseas or at a pinch via one of the online bookstores. For the purposes of this review I read the Hachette Australia oversized, and got to say overpriced, first edition paperback. I am slightly annoyed that in Australia they seem to be on occasion doing away with the hardback edition but throwing over large paperbacks in our direction.

ScaryMinds Rates this read as ...

Excellent horror novel, recommended to Australian horror fans and those of us who like our James Herbert novels. Check it out, you will be glad you did