SUBURBAN NIGHTMARES
I’m a huge fan of Christopher Ritchie, the new “one to watch” name on the Indie author circuit. His dark, subversive writing is underpinned with flashes of gallows humour, intense imagery and bullet speed narratives. In Ritchie’s imagination no subject – however taboo – is off limits which explains why The Ordinary, the much-anticipated sequel to House of Pigs, is already being hailed as a classic of its genre. Fusing horror with psychology and new age religion, this is a book that repels as much as it fascinates. It’s no surprise that Ritchie picked up silver honours at the 2015 Foreword Reviews of IndieFab Awards! The Ordinary is the silent unseen force that ruthlessly exploits humanity’s moral flaws as it drifts towards a prophetic end game. Every weakness, no matter how slight, is an opening on which to feed and the Ordinary is good at finding the gaps.
Porn baron George Lazarou, the brains behind the SkinFlix adult entertainment service, is so amoral he would happily put his daughter in front of a camera to turn a profit: pensioner misfit Stanley is obsessed with underage teenage girls who he imprisons as trophy “brides” in his suburban bolt hole: Jock and Bleach, his low life “errand boys”, are paid to find the flesh. They know that beneath the mildness of his manners, Stanley is a man not to be messed with, yet they can live with that because his pockets are deep. The arrangement between this gruesome trio works well until the day that Bleach accidentally kills one of the girls, triggering a murder inquiry and a terrifying chain of events that will pitch mankind’s survival against the Ordinary’s destructive powers. Lives will be lost, others saved while loyalties will be tested beyond their natural limits.
One of the few rays of hope in the bleakness are Jez, the laid-back pot smoking son of a retired police officer, and his resourceful Polish girlfriend Maria. She is the rare prize of goodness that slips through the Ordinary’s poisonous net although the failure to claim her is not enough to deter them from their mission of world domination. It starts with a massive coastal contamination (wrongly assumed to be an oil spill), which then mutates into a slimy, tendrilled network of flesh-eating creatures who rampage their way through Europe, America, South Africa and the Brazilian favelas.
Every death is brutal and while Ritchie’s descriptions aren’t necessarily over the top, there’s enough detail to almost feel the sensation of being throttled alive or eviscerated. For the squeamish that makes for uncomfortable reading but then The Ordinary wasn’t written to be a “feel good” book. It’s a novel that confronts the idea of a morally decayed world via some depressingly familiar 21st century themes. Stanley’s child “brides” are euphemisms for the streams of anonymous women trafficked into domestic and sexual servitude; Jock and Bleach are the deliverymen for whom having a conscience isn’t a necessary part of the job; the porn baron has built his wealth on exploiting a mentally ill man, while encouraging naïve young women to believe that starring in sex movies will give them control over their bodies. Maybe The Ordinary is the payback humanity deserves!
The biblical overtones in this novel are striking though not overplayed and amidst the death, gore, and destruction lurk some genuine nuggets of ironic black humour. As the Ordinary run amok, Jez and Maria hide in a supermarket freezer with a handful of other survivors. It turns out to be a bad move when the group must decide whether to open the door and brave the consequences, or freeze to death. A beef joint solves the problem!
The Ordinary is a novel with a tight structure, believable characters, and a compelling storyline. What makes it especially chilling is Ritchie’s use of the benignity of the suburbs as his narrative backdrop. The manicured lawns, double glazed windows, and pebble dashed house fronts will be familiar to most of his readers yet horrifying acts of violence are being perpetrated behind the flutter of white lace curtains.
The Ordinary is an uncompromising, thought provoking piece of writing that encourages us to think about the future and what it is that we want. Decency hangs by a thread in a hard, cynical world where pornography is mainstream, money is valued above self-respect, while goodness hovers near the edge of extinction. Yet despite the gloom the novel never loses its underlying sense of optimism. Humanity cannot live without hope and the Ordinary will never survive as long as that truth remains intact.
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
This article first appeared in Dante Magazine: http://www.dantemag.com/
Why not add House of Pigs, Stop the ‘Pocalypse! I Wanna Get Off! and by to your Christopher Ritchie collection?
Why not watch the video of the author in conversation with Read2Write’s Juliette Foster?
