I recently finished a book called The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper.  It is a book I probably wouldn’t have chosen to read normally: somewhere between horror and thriller, set in Canada, and featuring a frustrated author as its main character.  To me that sounded like a recipe for disaster, but actually I quite enjoyed the book.  This is what I said about it:

When I started this I did not think I was going to like it: its a book about somebody trying to write a book, and that has the potential to be so inward-looking and self-referential that the reader can feel like an intruder.

To be honest, I did feel a bit like that until about half way through the book, and then realised that I had got wrapped up in the story, I really wanted to know what was going to happen next, and I started reading faster and faster to find out.

The first half is saved by the story-within-a-story that is revealed duting sessions of the writers’ circle.  Not only is it fundamental to the rest of the novel but it would make a decent short story on its own.

Squemish readers will be pleased to hear that while this book is high on tension it is very low on gore.  Much like a Hitchcock film, it relies on suggestion for its scares rather than explicit violence.

A word about why I was apprehensive about reading a book about writing: the traditional advice given to would-be writers is to write about what you know.  When you see that the topic is how hard it is to write a book you do have to worry in case that is because it is the only thing the wirter knows and the whole thing disappears up its own fundament in an orgy of navel-gazing.

Fortunately Andrew Pyper, unlike his protagonist, does have a story to tell and once it gets going there is a good plot with all the necessary twists and red herrings to keep a reader guessing.