Whisper Down the Lane

 “He wanted to take it all back. Everything he said to Mr. Yucky and the Bad Snatcher. It felt wrong now, having all these eyes on him.”

– Clay McLeod Chapman, Whisper Down the Lane

🏫I received an e-ARC of this story from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a fair review. Whisper Down the Lane (2021) will release on 6th April!🏫

So recently, I finally took the plunge and signed up for NetGalley. I couldn’t really give you an answer as to why I hadn’t up to this point, as it’s such a fantastic way to read exciting new books ahead of their release dates. It had always been on my radar, but I’m glad to finally have caught on to the trend myself and joined. Immediately after signing up, I cast my interest out in a couple of books from authors that I either already loved or had caught my eye in the past. To be honest, I hadn’t actually been expecting to get these ARCs, since my account was so new. So naturally, I was super excited to receive the emails of approval for two of the three I expressed interest in, one of which was this, Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming Whisper Down the Lane.

This book tells the story of Richard Bellamy, an elementary school art teacher without a past – or rather, one that he’d like to pretend doesn’t exist. Richard has managed to put his history behind him and start a new life in Danvers, Virginia, where he leads a contented existence with his wife Tamara and her son from an earlier relationship, Elijah. Everything is perfect – his new marriage, his first chance at fatherhood, his quaint little job – until the school’s pet rabbit is found ritualistically killed on the school grounds on Richard’s birthday, with a card addressed to him on it’s corpse. What follows is a taut and incredibly tense psychological thriller, as Richard’s past threatens to catch up to him and he wonders who he can truly trust.

Whisper Down the Lane’s story is distinctly divided into two main narrative strands; Damned if You Do Sean, which takes place during 1983, and Damned if You Don’t Richard, the ‘present day’, which takes place in 2013. Interestingly, the story also adopts two tenses – Sean’s story is told in a third person past tense, whilst Richard’s is narrated in the first person present. This is a really challenging thing to get right, as alternating tenses and persons can become awfully confusing, but I think the distinctness of the two tales makes it easy to follow, and in the end they link together oh so well.

I felt that Richard made for a really interesting and engaging protagonist. Even from the offset, it’s clear that he has more than a few skeletons in his closet, and the way this ties into Sean’s narrative is effectively done. The two strands, which at first seem unrelated, gradually become intricately entwined and woven into one larger picture. Richard has a cynical narration and sense of humour, and it slowly becomes evident that this may be something of a defence mechanism. The other central character is of course Sean, and I thought that his story sections were believable as far as Sean’s age went; the way he acts and reacts to certain things felt authentic and true to how a young boy would.

Being familiar with the historical and societal context of the story isn’t a necessity, as Chapman explains it well, but it certainly does enrich the experience, to have even a passing knowledge of America’s ‘Satanic Panic’ that swept the nation during the 1980s, and in particular the McMartin preschool trial case that serves as the main basis for the narrative. You might be inclined to assume that the events depicted in this book could never actually take place, that this sort of manic mass hysteria could never have such a stranglehold over an entire country. But as history proves, it really did. I think this collective madness was presented accurately throughout the book, particularly in the way that it affects the mental state of Sean’s mother in the past section and Richard’s own grip on reality in the present.

Speaking of the plot, I thought it was just fantastic. Information was drip-fed throughout, and despite the link between the 1980s narrative and the present one being fairly easy to telegraph early on, the story from then on is a delirious descent into paranoia, and never what I would call predictable. Chapman keeps his cards close to his chest regarding whether there is genuinely any supernatural element to the plot. What I loved most is that the story felt so realistic, like it could just have much been a memoir of one of the children who went through this exact situation during the 1980s.

Overall, Whisper Down the Lane succeeds at being a very intense and expertly told chiller – skilfully walking the tightrope between its seemingly supernatural elements and its all too real ones – but it is so much more than that. It’s a story of lies and consequences, of no ‘black and white, right and wrong’, just morals of varying shades of grey. It’s a tale that is scarily still so germane, even today. Obviously the themes in this story might not be to everyone’s tastes, and I think the current spread in reviews and ratings support that. But the thing is, as dark and downbeat as the plot is, it’s also evidence that sometimes the scariest stories of all are those that are all too real.

VERDICT: I could talk for ages on the books I really love, those that earn the full five stars from me, but I’ll stop myself there and say that Whisper Down the Lane is simply brilliant start to finish – by turns a thoroughly entertaining, terrifying, and ultimately heart-breaking read. It’s clear that Chapman knows the horror genre inside and out – the myriad references and ‘Easter eggs’ to horror books and films are indicative of that – but as in any truly great work of horror fiction, he understands that the genre is at its very best when infused with real meaning and social commentary. In that regard, Whisper Down the Lane is a true triumph; a gut-wrenching, emotionally devastating, and disturbingly relevant work.

It’s a highly deserved full ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ from this reviewer! I also want to say a humongous thank you to both the author Clay McLeod Chapman, publisher Quirk Books, and to NetGalley, for providing the ARC and giving me the chance to read and review it early.