Country: U.K
Genre: Psychological Thriller/Police Procedural
Pages: 374
Flashes of the night before entered his brain, a barrage of images of wounds, deep lacerations, skin opening to internal redness, a woman on a bed hunched and exposed like a piece of meat.
He tried to remember what had happened, the slow memory dripping into his waking brain, leeching the morning light of its hope.
It's true that I love everything dark, but certain genres are more tired than others. The police procedural for example, lived and died riding the wave of CSI, who saturated the market with their product. The thrillers based around serial killers also. I mean, where can you go after Hannibal Lecter? The character was so brilliant, it's hard to top that. That kind of socio-historical pressure didn't discourage Richard Godwin from taking a stab at mashing up both genres. So, is APOSTLE RISING a success? You bet it is. It goes deeper into madness, harder into descriptions and further in the dark. It's a groundbreaking novel that explores new avenues for the psychological thriller genre. Reading it, I felt brought back to my Asian horror cinema days, where fellow movies enthusiasm would bump in each other, saying: "Have you seen this? Nothing can prepare you for this. I will leave you weeping for your mother". APOSTLE RISING would be the literary equivalent of these movies. It pushes the envelope and requires all of your fortitude.
The plot employs popular formulas, but it's in the execution that APOSTLE RISING rides ahead of the pack. Detective Chief Inspector Frank Castle is a rugged cop, but he's haunted by particularly painful failures. The Woodland Killings, unsolved murders that happened twenty-eight years before the events of APOSTLE RISING are a thorn in his side he's been living with all that time. When a copycat killer starts dropping new victims, Castle and his partner DI Jacki Stone get on the case. This killer has obvious detailed knowledge of what happened back then, so Castle goes back to this tormented place in his memory and goes out bothering his old suspects. But scratch a scab and it will start bleeding again. This time, Stone is also brought down into the downward spiral of madness.
This is a novel of terrific ambition. There are multiple point of views, many things happening at the same time. There's a tremendous feeling of scope. The hunt for the Woodlands killer is an investigation that sprawls all over the city and Godwin takes the time to micromanage and display how many lives are affected by the killings. Only author I can think of who reached such a tremendous sense of scope (and more than Godwin) is Norman Mailer in THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, which was a romanticized social study on murder. Another thing that made APOSTLE RISING so edgy and daring is how Godwin put his protagonists through a meat grinder. You get the sense that Castle and Stone and going through hell, which make you root even harder from them. It's a very simple trick he uses. Dialectics. Godwin puts moments of vulnerability for his characters next to moments of brutal violence, moments of personal distress next to police work. They resonate together to create a frightening, larger-than-life picture. Not to mention that the writing itself it beautiful. Those moments of intimacy and vulnerability are beautifully crafted.
But that night she'd lain there and heard him creep up the stairs and come into the bedroom smelling of another woman. Cheap perfume clashing with his aftershave. She knew Don's odour, it was a secret comforter she didn't talk about. Sometimes as he slept she would lie so close to him she was almost touching him and breathe him like an expensive wine.
With the fearless writing and risk taking comes eventual pitfalls. While Godwin managed to work around most, there is one aspect of the novel that didn't work as well. It's a strength and a weakness at the same time, particularly between page 100 and 200 as the bulk of the victims are falling and the point of view shifts at a manic pace, within the same chapters. Sometimes a character has only about a hundred words before Godwin shifts to another character. It's great and it works very well when it's paced right, but sometimes it was too much and I got confused about who I was reading about. It goes in so many directions, aims at so many things that you don't know where to look.
But I can't blame Godwin for taking chances and going places where no other thriller writer wants to go. Reminds me of that guy Leonardo Da Vinci, I don't know if you've heard of him? He stole corpses off battlefields to study human anatomy. He must've looked like a weirdo back then, but he ended up revolutionizing the modern world. I don't compare both guys, but what I'm saying is that you have to take some chances to make things happen and to make a genre evolve. APOSTLE RISING is a damn good novel. It's bold and its trying to break through the limitations of the psychological thriller and police procedural genres. It was a little frantic and wild, but you want to keep up with Godwin. He's gonna get tighter, more focused and will end up changing the game.
FOUR STARS