Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
When his family is killed in an automobile accident the narrator of this novel experiences something more than just a tragedy. What dies along with his wife and child is the equilibrium tethering him to life itself.
Lost in a void of grief a conversation overheard by chance offers the chance to find a new purpose? What if there are people living the life stolen from his family who do not deserve to be?
On the spur of the moment he commits a murder, removing, as he sees it, from the earth a man who has done nothing but harm. Others follow, a campaign of ethical murder and, possibly, personal disintegration detailed in a journal found abandoned in a diner.
This is a long way from the standard revenge fantasy where someone wronged by the world sets out to settle the score. It is both a meditation on the eternal question of what happens when a person sets himself up as judge, jury and executioner, and a frightening glimpse into a mind coming apart at the seams.
The single voice with its looping phrases and repeated justifications skates, entirely deliberately, over the philosophical considerations that might deflect its narrator from his chosen path. This is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, in which the narrator is also locked into a worldview that might fracture were it to admit an alternative perspective.
William Ferraiolo has delivered a debut novel that looks into the void in a truly unsettling way, suggesting he may be someone to watch. Even if you wouldn’t want to turn your back on the characters he writes about.
