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THE MAN IN THE WALL
Emma Angsrom
This is a great thriller. It is very tense and has some real nail biting moments. I love a novel full of tension and suspense and Angstrom wastes no time delving straight into creating an atmosphere that is unsettling and creepy.
From the first chapter there are things that start to chill you to the bone. Mysterious happenings, things appearing, disappearing, strange things going on... and although the characters might want to convince themselves that they are misremembering or imagining things, the reader is very sure that something deeply dark and disturbing is afoot. I was hooked.
So what is the story about? There are two main characters, W and Alva, and we'll come to W soon but first meet Alva, a young girl whose father is in prison. Alva, her mother and her sisters move to an apartment building but they are unhappy and Alva is terribly lonely and excluded.
Then there is a murder in the building. A husband discovers his wife's dead body in their house even though she disappeared two weeks previously. It seems impossible to solve the mystery of what happened, where the body had been for two weeks and how it then suddenly reappeared. There are some great passages when other residents within the apartment talk about squeaking floorboards, unaccountable sounds and a strange sensation of being watched. What is going on within the walls of this building?
The other thing that added intrigue and tension was Alva's character. She is young, impressionable and trying to make sense of her own family situation but also she seems disturbed and unnaturally fascinated by ghosts and the supernatural. The stories she writes in school are not appropriate and the one she tells her friends frightened me enough to want to put the main bedroom lights on! Alva finds a book about the occult and spends time reading it, unnaturally absorbed within it and then, when back at school and facing some unpleasant problems with some of the children there, she finds herself implementing some of the spells and devising her own voodoo experiments. Yet at the same time she is a lonely child and it is impossible for the reader not to feel empathy, sympathy and affection towards her.
The other main character is W and he is completely scary, creepy and dangerous. There are some very well written scenes capturing his unnerving, unnatural existence and it is impossible not to shudder or shiver when reading about him. The description of how and when he appears are particularly chilling and compelling. I found it so easy to visualise the scenes in the book and they really captured my imagination.
I was quite entranced by this story. It wasn't what I was expecting but I found myself hooked and turning the pages way later into the night than is recommended with a book like this! I think it was an exciting read because there were elements of surprise, horror, the occult and murder. I found it very readable and very compelling. The ending is definitely going to give me nightmares!
*Thank you so much to Sarah Hardy and Bloodhound Books for inviting me along on the Blog Tour and providing a copy of the ebook in return for an honest review*
The Man in the Wall is published by Bloodhound Books.
Emma Ångström is an author and architect. She has a Master’s degree in architecture from the Royal Technical University in Stockholm and from Parsons in New York. Besides her writing she currently works as head of communications at an architectural firm in Stockholm, Sweden.
She was born in 1982 in Västerås, Sweden, and started her writing career as a journalist at the age of 17. Since then, she has also worked as a lighting designer, and written non-fiction books about lighting design and architecture.
Ångström made her debut in 2009 with the novel AND ALL IS DISTORTED (Och allt är förvridet). In 2016 THE MAN IN THE WALL was released, a remarkable and nerve-wracking thriller with a ”monster” it is hard not to feel certain sympathy with. Condensed writing shaping characters of real flesh and blood, a steady hand’s brushwork forming each piece of the portrait’s originality to a whole, stylistically assured.
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