PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.

The Blackhouse

THE BLACKHOUSE is the first novel in Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, police procedurals set on the Isle of Lewis out in the Scottish Hebrides. It’s a novel about the isolation, the traditions that built out of that isolation, and the history of a protagonist who goes home, reluctantly, in order to investigate a crime.

I bought it after seeing May at the Adelaide Writers Festival a few years back, then hearing people rave about his books over and over. I spent the entire read with a notecard beside me, jotting down page numbers where he deployed techniques I could lift for my own projects.

Then it became a process of jotting down page numbers purely because May delivered a great description, deploying language with a precision that a lot of writers never manage. The Isle of Lewis may be a real place–the kind you can visit and touch and walk through–but for the vast majority of readers it needs to be constructed as carefully as any fantasy setting.

It’s a detective story, but very little of it is really about the detective. It’s about a place that’s Other, and what it means to come from there. What it means to have started there and learned to survive in another world by forgetting it.

Recommended.