Creature of the Night by Kate ThompsonI didn't know what to expect with this novel: supernatural, real-life or an amalgamation of the two. Having read it, I suppose the third option is the closest. The book tells the story of 14 year old Bobby, a 14 year old tearaway from Dublin who moves with his mum and young brother to a tiny village in the Irish countryside. He hates it and wants to go back to the streets of Dublin where he spends his time drinking, smoking, stealing and joyriding. The house they move into was left unexpectedly unoccupied when Lars, the previous tenant, did a runner.
The country turns out to be very different from the city, especially when the new arrivals are told to leave a bowl of milk out for the fairies. Booby becomes torn between the pull of his old ways and the lure of something new, all the while dealing with his brothers new obsession with a "little old woman" who visits him in the middle of the night. Part supernatural thriller and part contemporary coming-of-age story, this will stay with you long after you've read it. There are no easy answers and the main characters are painted in a realistic, and at times, unsympathetic light which actually endeared them to me more than if they had been perfect.
A blisteringly good read that manages to marry two genres so successfully you never see the join.
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I told my ma I wouldn’t stay there. I told her when she first came up with the idea and I told her again when she tried to bribe me with the new Xbox. I said it to her all the way down on the bus. Every time she opened her mouth to talk to me I said it: ‘I’m not staying down there. You can’t make me.’ So after a while she stopped trying to talk to me and she just talked to Dennis, showing him cows and sheep and tractors out the window of the bus. He liked the
tractors but he didn’t know what to make of the cows and sheep. He stared at them like they were something out of another world.
Which they were.
Our new landlord met us at the bus station in Ennis. His name was PJ Dooley. When he seen how much stuff we had with us he made a joke and said he
should have brought the trailer. I said, ‘Ha ha,’ and my ma gave me a savage look.
‘It’s mostly theirs,’ I said to him. ‘I’m not staying.’
PJ Dooley looked at me and then at my ma, and Dennis said, ‘Can we go in the car?’ and everyone started piling in the suitcases and plastic bags and backpacks. There wasn’t much room left by the time me and Dennis tried to squash into the back.
‘Take him on your knee,’ my ma said, but I didn’t want him on my knee and I shoved him over on top of a big bag of duvets and pillows. He laughed and wriggled himself comfortable and said: ‘We going in the car!’ My ma didn’t have a car. She said there was no need for one where we lived because we could go everywhere on the bus, so Dennis had hardly ever been in a car
before. I was in cars all the time, though. Most weekends and some week nights as well, me and the lads would get hold of one. Sometimes we robbed two and raced them against each other out on the ring road or around the estates. That was class. It was what I lived for, the cars, and the Saturdays in the town centre, and what we bought with the money we got.
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