BLOOD LIKE MINE

Written By:

Georgia Smith

Stuart Neville returns with the cerebral and heart-racing new novel, Blood Like Mine. Compulsively page-turning, brutally and tightly plotted, the book offers all the drama of a quintessential noir crime-thriller whilst the dark tendrils of the supernatural churn in the depths below. A cat-and-mouse chase across the vast emptinesses of America follows protagonist Moonflower and her mother Charlotte in their desperate attempt to disappear, and the haunted, has-been Agent Donner as he follows the trail of bodies they leave behind. What appears as an initially straightforward premise ducks and weaves around itself until Blood Like Mine becomes an intricate tapestry of twists, turns, and razor-sharp plotting.

An immediately striking atmospheric start to the novel sets out just how high the stakes of the protagonists are. Teenage Moonflower and her mother Charlotte have been travelling alone in a campervan for the apparent majority of Moonflower’s life – no identification, cloned number plates, and a desperate avoidance of any other people. It’s clear from the start that these semi-fugitives are being sought after by Marc Donner, a police detective tasked with unravelling the mysterious deaths of a string of men convicted of online child grooming. Quite why these two parallel narratives are connected is uncertain, unravelled slowly as the novel progresses into the murky depths of necessary violence and the true nature of human morality. Neville’s style is tight, straightforward, almost bleakly matter-of-fact, and it brings to life the starkness of not only the strange and dangerous situations facing his characters, but the vast empty expanses of land that the novel operates within. Dense forests, run-down motels, bleary striplit malls – the seedy and lonely underbelly of an America it is all too easy to hide within. The bodies pile up, the roads stretch out behind, and the stakes steadily rise as these two parallel narratives swing close and collide.

Blood Like Mine is not only a dark and violent thriller, however. The focal point of the novel, the epicentre from which the events spread, is the relationship between Moonflower and Charlotte. Switching between narrative sections and handwritten letters taken from a police dossier, Neville weaves a strikingly rich background and life of his two focal characters. Written from Charlotte to her daughter Moonflower from before she was born, these seized letters are a stunningly three-dimensional view into the events and circumstances that have shaped the pair’s lives. Concerned with nothing but the protection of the other, bound by blood and circumstance and love, Charlotte and Moonflower’s relationship is told through these intermittent handwritten sections, and feels much more realistic and human as a result. Blood Like Mine hinges not on the violence that drives it, but on the nature of mother-daughter relationships – and the question of whether a bond so strong and animal is always bound for destruction. What do people truly become when all social barriers are removed? The novel toys with this idea through this beautiful and poignant relationship, as well as demanding readers try and decide for themselves what lengths they would stretch to if they truly had no choice.

The novel’s straightforward, Stephen King-esque horror blends masterfully with these cerebral considerations. Explosions of violent high drama are offset by deeply philosophical ideas; subtle enough to not be immediately obvious, and yet pertinent enough to give the book a really fleshed-out, mentally engaging feel. ‘King with a conscience’, in a sense. Blood Like Mine isn’t startling in its brutality for nothing, it isn’t thrilling for the sheer sake of it – it embodies the conflicts and demands of a person’s core humanity, the nature of the justice system, the nature of evil and who decides what evil truly is, and the irreparability of simply making choices. Despite its mysterious supernatural centrepoint, the novel’s real triumph is its deep and base humanity, as well as its understanding of the ways that these ideas about morality and love can warp into something dark and dangerous when pushed beyond normal limits. The changing between Neville’s matter-of-fact narrative style and the heartfelt handwritten sections (a clever plot device as well; pushing readers to question why these papers have been seized, archived – what unfathomable depths the novel will finally sink to) embodies this in a really original, successful manner. It becomes impossible to take anyone’s side, to fully accept someone’s actions, to truly understand what is driving them to such crazed lengths as this; in a sense, the novel demands that readers question even their own morality at times, and why they’ve come to these final conclusions about wrong and right.

The novel is enjoyably, claustrophobically eerie. Neville’s pacing is electric and the plot stunningly tight. Each explosion sends the plotline off-course, careering in a direction it was impossible to see coming. It is tense from the first page to the last and the stakes sweep to the lofty heights of its thunderous climax. Stakeouts, car chases, hiding out on the run – Neville’s creation of his own setting is three-dimensional, believable, and makes this slow-burn supernatural element all the more delightfully creepy. Blood Like Mine finds the deep, dark, animalistic core of human existence and plays it out across these sweeping expanses of setting, leaving behind a stampede of considerations about what true evil actually is, what true justice actually is – and how far is too far to save someone you love?