Pig Island, Mo Hayder, Penguin, $7.99.
Pig Island is disturbing in a different way. Hayder sets up the story with a marginally conventional beginning, gets you half way through the book, and you are then left wondering where the heck she is heading. It's the story of journalist Joe Oakes and his desperately unhappy wife, Lexie. Oakes has founded his career on exposing hoaxes, and he thinks he's found one of the biggest of all time on Pig Island. A tourist has shot video—released to the press and available to all and sundry on YouTube—of some sort of human creature with a long tail. Of course the locals think it's the devil.
As it turns out, Pig Island is the stopping ground of a previous bete noir of Oakes'—one Malachai Dove, a sometime evangelist who claims to have the power of faith healing. Long ago Oakes had felt he exposed Dove and Dove had issued a threat to him. Few people are allowed—or want—to go over to the island, but Oakes gets permission from the religious cult now living there to come over and interview them and get at the truth of the monster and to their ties to Dove. Oakes heads over to the island, leaving his wife alone in their rented cottage in the middle of Scotland's no man's land.
Nothing Oakes finds on Pig Island is what he—or the reader—expects to find. As the story turns darker and more violent, Hayder then pulls you back, taking you farther along in time. Then things again turn darker and more violent and again she pulls you back. In a way she's like the literary equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock—his dictum that if there's a loaded gun in the room it's bound to go off eventually, the suspense coming from the "when". Like Hitchcock, she lulls you along with her story and then it explodes.
This is really a book about mistaken expectations and preconceptions and the kind of trouble they can get you into. And while this brilliant book is structured like a horror novel, Hayder is at heart a psychological thriller writer. As you read, pay attention to the characters—they actually drive the story. This is the work of both a master narrative stylist as well as a master psychological writer. Disturbing, but well worth the trip.
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