House Of Pigs

 PARALLEL UNIVERSE?

This brain twisting novel by British horror writer Christoper Richie has attracted plenty of critical acclaim and deservedly so as he takes the reader on a terrifying journey that tests the imagination, pushing it beyond the limits of what is “normal”. 

When officer Joe Gullidge answers a routine police call at an isolated farm house, the situation descends into a sequence of horrifically unsettling events that reach into the depths of his soul. As Gully is dragged into a reluctant search for the truth his conscious mind struggles to separate reality from the suggestion of a parallel world. Is Gully’s journey a metaphor for a disturbing event that happened in the past, or is the explanation more straightforward than it might initially appear?

House of Pigs doesn’t fall into the “easy read” category as the ideas are complicated while the multiple narrative layers make it open to different interpretations. To some readers that might be a bit of a turn off, but it’s a deliberate quirk to strengthen a novel that’s intellectually challenging and which takes us outside an emotional comfort zone. House of Pigs is a gripping, surreal work with an eerie narrative and visually descriptive touches reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Shining.

Reviewed by Juliette Foster 

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BEYOND THE LIMITS OF DREAMS

House of Pigs is one of those books that you could easily read several times and interpret it slightly differently on each occasion. Born out of a combination of the author’s dreams, Christopher Ritchie’s debut novel is strange, twisted and even inexplicable in places. A bit like when you try to recount dreams and nightmares to your friends in the real world. As the plot progresses, nothing is really as it seems. This isn’t an easy beach read. Its merits lie in its incredible imagery and description, its unsettling plot, and the creation of an entire world that challenges the reader as they work through the book. So, what is this strange, unusual novel all about?

It opens with police officer Joe Gullidge, known as ‘Gully’, being sent to Hawks Farm because of a “disturbance”. This is essentially the only ‘normal’ part of the book for want of a better word as the sequence of events quickly descends into chaos and confusion. Gully and his colleagues Frank and Tom arrive at the farm to find all the sheep have disappeared. Then they find a corpse in a barn before being attacked by an unknown assailant. Gully – and the reader – are then transported into a horrifyingly unsettling world.

The remainder of the book details both actual events and Gully’s inner search for truth, including his own truth. As the plot progresses, and Gully faces more violence and terrifying happenings, he struggles to work out what’s real and what is a parallel world. This is reflected in the plot, and so the reader goes on this eerie journey with Gully. This odd new existence the protagonist has entered leads him to realise the disturbing nature of his own past as well as that of his hunters’. But there is no escaping it all – he has to follow it to the end, however terrifying the outcome. It is a journey, as the book’s blurb describes, “where only the unseen know the truth”. It’s as if Gully is at some kind of breaking point in his life and must discover and accept the truth of his murky past to move on. To give you an idea of how strange and unsettling, yet evocative, the narrative is, this passage near the start of the novel encapsulates it well.

“Gully and Tom swung gently from ropes that stretched up yet appeared unattached to anything. Their eyes were barely parted slits, their necks sporting barely open slits, with pulsating rivulets of blood slowly draining away their lives. Pooling beneath their feet, it glistened under blazing sunlight.” 

So, it’s creepy, gruesome and totally confusing but also gripping at the same time. What’s the meaning behind the book? The overarching meaning is sort of for the reader to decide for themselves, but one interesting point Chris has made about his protagonist is that he begins as a shell or husk of a man, not really understanding his own place in the world and instead occupying someone else’s. As the book moves on, he comes to understand who and what he is, and subsequently he tries to push back on this and be a force for good. So, one interpretation of the novel is that it’s about the journey people go on to find a space in the world to occupy, and everything both internal and external they must grapple with to do this, especially that of morality.

Ritchie’s book is definitely horror but not in the ‘loads of scary monsters’ type way. It’s a much more unsettling horror. It reminds me of the recent film Midsommar, if you’ve seen it. Weird, twisted, and inexplicable. It has the ability to make you feel physically uncomfortable. It goes against what we, as humans need – understanding and clarity. It’s difficult to make sense of and it makes the reader feel as if they’ve been plunged head first into the brain of a stranger, whose story they don’t know and whose fears they find confusing. But if you’re up for the challenge, I definitely recommend this unique debut novel. Just so you can make your own mind up about it.

Reviewed by Lucy Skoulding