John Connolly's The Lovers: Teaching Gothic Thrillers, Whilst Meeting Your Nemesis!

John Connolly’s Gothic Detective Fiction is striking for its lack of compromise. For thresholds between reality and the extraordinary or even the supernatural are crossed and redrawn without the refuge of rational explanation. This novel in particular explores the possibility of supernatural beings who survive both death and time: revenging, predatory creatures of eternal destruction!

For what if you were haunted by a pair of lovers whose desire for your annihilation was so strong that it defied both death and time? A defiance whose ability to regenerate itself in physical terms makes mortality seem a desperately facile illusion and inconvenience. This novel explores the early family background of Connolly’s detective Charlie Parker, revisiting the stories surrounding his dead Policeman father whose career ended infamously with his suicide after the seemingly senseless, cruel killing of two local, unarmed teenagers. Such stories progressively reveal themselves as contaminated as Pandora’s box and Charlie Parker’s determination to discover his past reanimates even the most painful events of his life. But can such reanimation save him? Perhaps it can. Perhaps the reanimated want to save him as well as destroy him, for who are figures of nemesis and who are angels without the fall?

Everyone you travel in The Lovers you meet a threshold of some kind. Doors, windows, memories are all opened and the closed- but what have you let in and what more importantly have you let out?

Charlie Parker finds that the past is shrouded by veils of deceit perpetuated by lonely, secretive old men whose motivations and predilections have crippled their lives. And yet the truth seems utterly incredible and even diabolical. There is no release through truth, just a terrible stumble down into a modern day Hades where nothing is worshipped except desire.

I found this book utterly compelling to read; marrow deep horror and a seeping awareness that Connolly’s universe contains creatures whose morality is irrecoverably buried in some Dantean hell. The ‘lovers’ of the title do not even know that they are lovers and a fated couple until the evil that is their mutual destiny begins to inhabit their souls like some deadly lodger.

Place, atmosphere and sensory impression combine to prevent any desire to sleep. One of the most engrossing and enthralling books I have read in a very long time.

And where you can only be saved by the dead. Your tragic, loving dead.

Not theirs.

John Connolly's The Lovers: Teaching Gothic Thrillers, Whilst Meeting Your Nemesis!