David Moody's 3 favorite reads in 2024

Despite its relative brevity, this is a remarkable read that lives long in the memory. It’s extraordinarily atmospheric and has, at the same time, both a fragile beauty and a relentless bleakness. Switching between Simon and Marie’s individual perspectives, and also between present day and flashbacks, the story feels almost dystopian in its description of two desperate people who’ve relocated to an equally broken, run down place. But the dystopia here really lies in the shattered lives of the main characters.

The writing is superb. So disarmingly powerful that despite revealing the ending within the first couple of pages, Simard’s prose is such that it’s easy to forget what you’ve already been told and fully focus on the tragic couple’s plight.

Without ever resorting to cliche, Simard flirts with genre tropes (the unfriendly/overfriendly/mysterious villagers, the ambiguous presence of an antenna in the woods which may – or may not – be somehow linked to whatever happened to the town) and yet this remains a focussed and wholly original novella. At its core the book is about grief and how it affects us, and the isolating unfriendliness of the setting leaves Simon and Marie stranded initially on an island of familiarity, brought together by the disorientation of everything else. Despite having set out its stall early on, the novella somehow still keeps you guessing, still keeps you looking over your shoulder.

There’s a wonderful sense of sadness and dread that drips off every page of THE COUNTRY WILL BRING US NO PEACE. It’s one of those stories that disarms you through its simplicity, then blindsides you with its resolution. Highly recommended.

The novel took me by surprise. It was sitting on my Kindle for an age before I started reading and, initially, I struggled with Blatty’s style. It felt all over the place at first, overwrought and with more semicolons per page than I’ve used in total over the course of writing more than twenty books. It took me a while to get into the rhythm, but once I’d got it I was hooked. The narration felt detached, oddly remote from the unbearable emotions of a parent watching her child go through an appalling ordeal, powerless to help. It felt almost matter of fact in the way Regan’s possession was described, and I think that’s why it had such an impact. The grotesque things the spirit makes the child do and say are described without unnecessary histrionics, and that added an unexpected layer of realism to impossible scenes.

This approach is in keeping with the attitudes of the characters, who exhaust all scientific and medical explanations for Regan’s possession before, eventually, they’re forced to accept the improbable and seek help from the church. And those characters themselves are similarly underplayed. At first, I found Chris’s superstar status to be a distraction, but as Regan’s condition deteriorates, the superficiality of the mother’s career and social standing is stripped away and all we’re left with is a terrified single parent, desperately trying to do the right thing for her suffering child. Father Karras, the young priest first approached to carry out the exorcism, is a trained psychiatrist struggling with his faith, as sceptical as anyone.

The novel has a slightly different focus to the film, with more time given to Detective Kinderman (who is investigating the murder of a film director at the MacNeil’s house), and his relationship with Karras. Karras’s internal conflict also occupies more space. The film’s unflinching graphic effects are part of the reason for its notoriety, yet the unpleasantness was actually dialled down from the page for the screen. Everything that is described in the novel and shown in the film is presented with a relatively unblinking eye and is there for a purpose – the head spinning, the vomiting, the self-mutilation… it’s shocking for sure, but none of it feels gratuitous. For me, there’s an almost documentary-like feel to the way the story is told, almost like we’re watching a case study.

A short but powerful read that packs an extraordinary amount of emotional heft into its brief page count. By writing from the perspective of a group of people detached from the rest of the world, the book helps us make sense of our lives on the surface below.