Review: The Black Angel

John Connolly has been ploughing his own literary furrow for many years using his Private Eye and former cop Charlie Parker to explore the border between our world and the next. This time Parker is in big trouble,

Connolly’s work is very different from most who work in the crime fiction genre, as he places a ‘supernatural’ veil over the proceedings, however, it is never certain that these themes really are ‘supernatural’ or purely the ravings of the madmen that fill the world of P.I. Charlie Parker. The real world like Connolly’s cannot be explained away purely from a secular / scientific viewpoint, nor can it be explained away completely from a theological / religious viewpoint either. The world around us is full of ambiguity, as well as darkness and could well be an uneven amalgam of the secular and the religious, part Heaven and part Hell. It is Connolly’s villains that make his stories chill because we never know if some of them are actually human.

“And I remembered the preacher, Faulkner, trapped in his prison cell, his children dead and his hateful crusade at an end. I saw again his hands reaching out for me through the bars, felt the heat radiating from his aged, wiry body and heard once more the words that he spoke to me before spitting his foul poison into my mouth. “What you have faced until now is nothing compared to what is approaching……The things that are coming for you are not even human.”

The Black Angel is Connolly’s fifth Charlie Parker novel [OK Parker appeared in a novella in Connolly’s short collection ‘Nocturnes’ released last year]. It opens with a very straight forward PI plot device, Charlie Parker is asked to help Louis [one half of the psycho partnership of Louis and Angel] track Alice, his drug-addicted prostitute neice. Then the novel abandons the conventions of the PI missing persons case, as Charlie Parker and the reader are sucked down into the area where our world meets hell. Parker soon discovers from Louis’s aunt, Martha that ‘Alice fell down a rabbit-hole and never came back.’ The hunt for Alice takes Parker down the dark edges of our society, the crack-dens, red-light areas, and the diseased and dying parts of the city that may be a portal to the past and future. Parker soon discovers that some very dark forces are involved with Alice. Her disappearance appears linked to the hunt for a religious artifact from a monastery in Sedlec in Eastern Europe that vanished during the closing months of WW2. The forces maybe fallen angels? The leader being the grotesque Brightwell, a creature who walks the earth trying to find a way back to heaven – OR is he just the leader of a group of madmen? Parker soon uncovers a network of collectors of ‘unusual artifacts’, some of which are carved from dried human skin and bones, and he also discovers that perhaps his own struggles are somehow linked, and that his world is far more dangerous than even he ever believed.

The Black Angel apart from being beautifully written, is a very dark book indeed, but it is not without humor [even if that too is as black as pitch], but there are sequences that make you laugh, and then suck in your breath as Connolly uses our amusement to question the dark side of our own natures. There are some things that are not funny, but seen through the eyes of the madmen that populate this novel, there is a very dark wit at play. Another issue in this novel is the texture. I find it marvelous how he blends fact with fabrication to give this extensively researched novel an interesting and unconventional dimension.

A wonderfully dark novel and highly recommended for the crime fiction reader who likes challenges.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Ali Karim - RAM

Book Review: The Black Angel