The Lonely Places
A Novel
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
In the electrifying tradition of Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell, J. M. Morris savagely plumbs the depths of psychological terror in an uncompromising and brutally brilliant suspense debut. The Lonely Places etches a fiendishly compelling portrait of madness and menace, eroticism and terror, that pits a woman’s mind against a world where nothing is as it seems.
THE LONELY PLACES
“Then along came a spider Who sat down beside her...”
Ruth Gemmill is broken. All she has known, all she has loved, all she has ever desired, have laid her waste. As autumn’s shadows begin to seep through her London home, Ruth escapes to the fading twilight of northern England in a last, desperate attempt to stave off the encroaching darkness. She needs the consolation of her brother, Alex: a man she cannot breathe without.
It’s not the first time. She couldn’t breathe without Matt either. Matt, who used to beat her. Matt, who loved to hurt her. Matt, whom she loved with a masochistic passion that destroyed everything in its path. But Ruth moved on, reinvented herself. Ruth found the strength to escape the terrifying abuse of her domestic existence. Or so she would like to think. Little does she realize the extent of the crippling cobwebs her vicious lover has spun throughout her mind.
But in the grim, foreboding town of Greenwell, where her brother now lives, fate deals Ruth another blow. For Alex has disappeared. To bring him safely home, she will be forced to confront her emotional demons through a bewildering landscape, where the phantoms of a menacing past lurk around every corner, wielding memories, determined to wake Ruth up to the most horrifying reality of all. Some webs can never be swept away, some spiders sting to destroy....
With chilling emotional precision and searing insight, J. M. Morris has created a novel that is at once devastatingly plausible, utterly poignant—and impossible to forget.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Self-declared all-around victim Ruth Gemmill, the heroine of Morris's debut suspense novel, flees her abusive lover and heads to the small northern England town of Greenwell for a surprise visit with her brother, Alex, a gay high school teacher. But Ruth is in for a surprise herself: Alex has disappeared, and few in Greenwell know or care where he has gone. Ruth's anxious inquiries bring to the surface her most disturbing memories and dreams of lurid childhood traumas, not to mention the unwelcome reappearance of the abusive lover, Matt. Meanwhile, the behavior of the Greenwell populace is so ominous Ruth suspects that even apparently helpful townsfolk like kindly Keith and lovely Liz may not be what they seem. Indeed, they are not. Ruth falls into the hands of rough policemen and the arms of friends of both sexes before winding up in the lonely places of the title, sites like the abandoned train station where Matt suffered the childhood rape that has made him so violent. Billed as "a novel of psychological suspense," the book is more like an over-the-top compendium of titillating terror, including scenes of pedophilia and sadomasochism. Morris's hallucinatory mixture of memory and nightmare, aggression and submission, pain and excitement will intrigue some readers and vex many others, as will the ending, which suggests Ruth's emotional roller-coaster ride was, like the town of Greenwell and its inhabitants, not at all what it appeared to be.