‘The Resurrectionist’ – Wrath James White

Some people are born with a name that just cries out to go on the front of a work of horror fiction and Wrath James White is one of those people... I’d never read his work before but comments left on this very blog suggested that I wouldn’t be wasting my time if I did. Everything stops by ‘Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review’ sooner or later and, sure enough, Wrath James White’s ‘The Resurrectionist’ came through the door last week. It’s been a while since we’ve had some horror on the blog so I was eager to give this book and go and see if it matched up to all the good things I’d heard about the author. It did, and then some...

No-one knows what little gifts life is going to throw their way; the whole thing is totally random and that can sometimes mean immense power ending up in the wrong hands... Dale McCarthy is a healer, able to bring the dead back to life so that they have no memory of their death. When girls aren’t attracted to you however, and you saw your father rape and murder your mother (before you bought her back to life), then there’s only really one way that you can use your gift to get what you want...
Ever since her new neighbour moved in across the street, Sarah Lincoln has been having the most terrifying nightmares. Every night she dreams of her own rape and murder, sometimes her husband dies too. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that she wakes up to find bloodstains on her mattress and bloody sheets in the laundry. No-one else is prepared to take her seriously but Sarah knows that something is horribly wrong here. Sarah also knows that she is the only one who can save herself from being murdered again, again and again...

Life is full of things that you will hopefully never have to see outside of horror fiction. They could be happening in that dark alley at the end of your street; they might even be happening in your neighbour’s house while you’re asleep... Things like this happen everywhere and horror fiction is the best way to experience them; you get that surge of full on terror but you can always close the book whenever you want and get on with something that sits a little easier. This wasn’t the case with ‘The Resurrectionist’ but only because I found myself wanting to keep reading... Wrath James White rubs your face in the basest elements of humanity right from the start (seriously, if you’re in the slightest bit queasy then be warned that this may not be for you!) and goes on to show how this shapes Dale in later years. You won’t necessarily like Dale but you will understand why he’s the person that he is. Adding this element of humanity (to a very sinister character) rounds Dale out and makes him a person where you want to read more about him and find out what makes him tick; I did anyway.

Then we proceed onto Sarah and Josh Lincoln and see how their life gradually falls apart after Dale moves in across the street. You may have seen this scenario before (couple terrorised by sinister neighbour) but White really ramps things up to give his reader a tale that buzzes with tension and fear.
While other horror books establish a set of preliminaries events, leading up to a climactic ending, White skips all of that to repeatedly go straight for the jugular. The only thing worse than dying is dying all over again; White gets this and by the end of the book so will you... Again, White doesn’t spare any of the details for his readers so be warned that Dale McCarthy is one depraved individual who will stoop to pretty much anything in order to get his kicks.

The gradual crumbling of Sarah Lincoln (contrasting with her urge to fight back), in the face of Dale’s onslaught, also makes for some compelling reading. We see this woman fight to understand what is happening to her even though it can’t be... can it? There is no escape (and little help from a sceptical police force) either and this helps Sarah to focus on what she has to do if she is ever going to get through this. What we get is a narrative where the main characters spend the day dreading nightfall and what will bring. The tension grows to unbearable heights, explodes... and then starts growing all over again. I loved it.

I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about the ending though. On the one hand it works well at wrong footing you just when you think there’s no way back and there’s a definite surprise in store for characters who thought that things had been taken care of. They have been taken care of, just not in the way you might think. On the other hand though, Dale’s final actions didn’t quite fit for me; especially given his fear when caught at the wrong end of a gun earlier in the book...

This is only a small issue though (although it was a shame that it surfaced right at the end of the book...). ‘The Resurrectionist’ is a piece of horror that may well have you wondering whether the nightmare you had last night was just a dream after all...

Nine out of Ten

P.S. (Several days later...) After chatting with Wrath, online, the ending makes more sense to me now. It's definitely more about wrongfooting people than raising awkward questions about Dale and what he can do! I'm not bumping the score up (as the score is always based on that initial read) but if/when I read it again it would get a higher mark.