Book review: Creeping Jenny by Jeff Noon
A deliciously creepy detective novel with plenty of Wicker-Man weirdness, set in a village where every day brings a new saintly restriction.
The blurb
The third book in Jeff Noon’s widely acclaimed ‘Nyquest Mysteries’ find our protagonist caught up in a new mystery that delves into nightmares, Saints and the answer to his father’s disappearance
In the winter of 1959, private eye John Nyquist arrives in the village of Hoxley-on-the-Hale with only a package of cryptic photographs, and the frail hope of finding an answer to a question he’s been asking since his childhood.
But the villagers offer little help, as each day brings a twisted new rule in the name of a different Saint that they, and Nyquist, must follow. And there are whispers of the return of the Tolly Man, an avatar of chaos in a terrible mask…
My review
I read ‘A Man of Shadows’, the first of Jeff Noon’s Jon Nyquist novels, about three years ago. It was a bit of a struggle: I didn’t like him much as a character; was unsure about the shift from detective-noir to queasily-magical surrealism; and the different time-streams / cycles were confusing. But something about Nyquist and his world nagged at me ever since.
I’m glad it did, because that’s what led me to ‘Creeping Jenny’, which I enjoyed much more. That’s partly because Nyquist has been taken out of his original Dayzone/Dusk/Nocturna environment, so the time-bending stuff is gone. Instead he’s in a village, Hoxley, with its own not-of-this-world ruleset that’s easier to grasp.
Every day (well, almost every day) is governed by a different local saint, with their own restriction or effect on the population. One saint’s day bars everyone from speaking; another sees the entire village fall asleep; another sees them wearing creepy flesh-merging masks turning them into ‘Alice’ or ‘Edmund’; and so on. Nyquist has to work within this framework to unravel a puzzle that might lead him to his long-lost father.
The strangeness is still there in spades. I suspect there’ll be lots of comparisons to psychedelic drugs experiences, especially the (few, not many) parts where the prose shifts into what’s almost a babbling mania. I don’t know about drugs: to me it often felt more like a feverish dream (or nightmare!) — and a couple of nights after reading it at bedtime, I had fairly weird dreams of my own. This as a compliment…
Hoxley is also properly, deliciously Wicker-Man creepy with its Tolly Man ritual and local legends, the villagers’ distrust of outsiders, and the nature of ‘Creeping Jenny’ herself, as Nyquist uncovers it. Meanwhile, I warmed to him much more as a character: his confusion, his tiredness, his yearning for information about his father — rounding him out beyond the boozing and beatings of the first book.
It’s much more than just the ‘hard-boiled detective out of his element’ noir it may seem at first glance. ‘Creeping Jenny’ is eerily, feverishly *weird* — but this time round, that’s its strength. I’d recommend it, and I am already looking forward to seeing what awaits John Nyquist next time out.
Other info
- Angry Robot’s page about Creeping Jenny
- Amazon (UK) link to Creeping Jenny
- This review on NetGalley and on Goodreads
- Disclosure: I was sent an advanced reading copy (ARC) of Creeping Jenny by the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review
