El horror genre It is usually a trough for writers of all kinds of satellite genres who from time to time immerse themselves in this narrative of hells and darkness materialized between us. So cases like the British CJ Tudor or the American JD Barker (abbreviations as mere coincidences) are laudable examples although they also seek that meaning of fear made literature branded with their initials.
And yes, with a Stephen King In clear retreat from the horrors that she governed with a firm hand since the end of the 20th century to delve into fantasies, dystopias and everything that comes from them with assured success, a writer like CJ Tudor efficiently patrimonializes the horrors of psychopathies and monsters of our days.
The paranormal always confronts us with unknown dimensions. Fourth dimensions that may well pose a challenge to science and knowledge as they can be a prolific, unfathomable space where the shadows of an evil that regularly manifests itself to us in our world lurk. If God does not exist everything is allowed, as I would say Dostoevsky. Books like those offered by Tudor neither confirm nor deny the existence of God, they only raise the chill of doubt, that all that bad content can ever find its particular wormhole from which to assault our world at last.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by CJ Tudor
The Girls of Chapel Croft
The popular imagination is increasingly broader in terms of references for terror. It all started with darkness and the discovery of fire as the only remedy to be able to see the world during the night hours. In the past it was easier... Now everything can tend to darken as soon as the machine is forced, from a nice clown to a touching couple of girls..., passing through that kind priest who looks at us as children waiting for our worst sins...
A dark history stirs in Chapel Croft. Adding to a long list of disappearances and deaths is that of the local parish priest, who hanged himself in his own church just a few weeks ago.
To replace him, Jack Brooks arrives in town. He brings with him a fourteen-year-old daughter and a troubled conscience, although he hopes to start a new life here. But what he finds is a place full of conspiracies and secrets where a strange welcome gift awaits him: an exorcism kit and a sinister message.
The deeper he delves into the city and gets to know its peculiar inhabitants, the more ancient disputes, mysteries and suspicions seem to surface. And when her daughter Flo begins to see ghosts of girls burning, it becomes clear that the ghosts of Chapel Croft refuse to rest in peace.
But uncovering the truth can be deadly in a town with a bloody past, where everyone has something to hide and no one trusts strangers.
The Other People
On a recurring basis we find the resurgence of literature or cinema about spirits, those entities that roam the interstices of our world in search of a final resolution to their cause. Because without fixing some pending issues, souls cannot finally escape from that strange wandering that is purgatory, a cold place where not even the spirits themselves are still free to fall into hell if they fail ...
While driving home one night, Gabe sees a girl's face appear in the rear window of the old rusty car in front of him. Just say one word: "Dad." It's his five-year-old daughter, Izzy. He never sees her again.
Three years later, Gabe spends his days and nights cruising the freeway looking for the car that took his daughter, refusing to give up hope even though most people think Izzy is dead. Fran and her daughter, Alice, have also traveled many miles on the highway. They do not seek. They flee. Trying to stay one step ahead of those who want to hurt them. Because Fran knows the truth. You know what really happened to Gabe's daughter. You know who is responsible. And he knows what they will do to them if they ever catch up with them ...
The chalk man
We already know that childhood by definition is a time of happiness. But in certain genres the contrasts are most fruitful to settle a good plot. When we read a thriller or a horror novel we expect a point of confusion that makes us stir restless, upsetting those spaces in which we can only sense security, happiness and various benefits.
The paradox is an extremely realistic sensation that, however, takes us out of our schemes. It all starts with a gentle reading about naughty, restless children, but then the story is turned upside down. At twelve, Eddie participates in his natural imaginative world, overflowing with good and bad ideas with which to hang out with his gang friends (The paradigmatic case of It from his own Stephen King)
The problem is when one of those bad ideas brings them closer to a space in which the imagination ends up tuning into the channel of evil, the one that haunts ideas about madness, the wildest dreams and finally a real unsettling drift.
The Chalk Man is the character on the other side of the mirror of childhood, that dark being who longs for some children to imagine too much and end up indulging in their fantasies coming from the dark side. And Eddie was his broadcast channel thanks to a particular incident ...
Eddie then accesses a particular plane of communication, introducing his friends to a fascinating game in which they manage to sketch that desired world apart from children. But the communication channel ends up being completely occupied by the Chalk Man, who thanks to them will draw up a malicious plan to launch himself into the occupation of more and more souls.
The body of a first victim, a poor girl, will discover the atrocious world that Eddie and his friends have accessed. And perhaps it is already too late. Their lives may be traced by that evil capable of remaking itself over the years ...
Other recommended books by CJ Tudor…
The disappearance of Annie Thorne
An apparently calm voice, that of Joe Thorne, transmits to us from an initial safe distance, the story of the disappearance of his sister Annie. Yesterday and today return to rubber band over a time that seems linked by the sinister feeling that evil governs everything, past, present and future, unless the rope finally breaks.
The key, the place where the suffocating knot of fear could be cut is in Arnhill. Only Arnhill happens to be a place covered by the dust of yesterday, like the worst memories of our lives, like the worst moments of anguish.
Joe hesitates. He doesn't know if he is right to return and he makes it clear to us. Something inside him impels him to run away once again, like when he was fifteen years old and his little sister returned from the abysses in which his soul was trapped in the barely two days that she remained missing.
But whoever rules the shadows, fear and madness knows that it only takes a bit of a tug on the rope for Joe to have to face him again in the most unjust of struggles. Because in the blockage that is born of fear there can be no opponent, only possession of the soul as the final achievement of the insane work.
But nothing better to ensure that Joe will return to Arnhill than to resort to the memory of guilt. Because he always knew that if he had not visited the old mine, nothing would have happened. Annie would not have been in that state of eerie shock and he would not have mortgaged her days in the darkness under her bed.
The story, of course, goes from more to less in intensity. But it is also true that the appearance of the mail that indirectly quotes Joe with his past is such a powerful idea that it is already enough hook to continue devouring pages while we enter the galleries of that mine, the perfect metaphor of the path towards introspection of the atavistic terror that shelters Joe.
The supernatural ends up sliding little by little, without the fanfare of so-called works of easy horror. The descriptions around Arnhill are enough to touch that fiber of the most maddening suspense, the one that prevents you from abandoning the reading.
And it's happening again ... That second part of the email is the one that brings a tension that covers everything. Joe is once again the child worried about his sister, still unaware of what awaits him, his sister, all his old friends and anyone else in that town already cursed thanks to the adventure spirit of some poor children.
