Thursday, June 20, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Book Review: The Call by Peadar O'Guilin




The Call is a Young Adult Fae Horror story written by Irish author Peadar O'Guilin.  Horror is....not a genre I have much interest in or really seek out, with the few books I read that can be classified as "horror" tending to be psychological or environmental horror more than anything.  The Call on the other hand is most definitely full on horror, but it's also a Fae Fantasy story, which is a bit more my kind of novel.*  And as its sequel ("The Invasion") was nominated for the Lodestar Award for Best YA SF/F novel of 2018, I decided to give it a try.

*Yes that sentence seems preposterous upon rereading it, but somehow "Fae Fantasy" has been a subgenre filled with many of my favorite books, so it's true I suppose.

 And The Call is a strong strong horror novel, keeping me on edge for the entirety of its short length (on Amazon it's listed as 320 pages, but on my kindle it seems to be shorter).  As you'd expect from a horror novel, it's definitely filled with gruesome deaths and body mutilations - to say nothing of the psychological trauma and horror faced by those who don't wind up dying - but it never feels gratuitous.  Add in a strong main protagonist, to go along with side characters who are decently well developed and interesting, and you have a really strong novel here for anyone who likes the Horror genre, and I will be reading the sequel shortly....after I take a breath.

Note:  I read this mostly as an audiobook on Hoopla, which is very good, so again if you're looking for a horror book in that format, this is a solid choice.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
30 Years ago, Ireland was cut off from the rest of the world by a strange magic.  The Sidhe, having been banished over a thousand years ago by the Irish to a land of hell, "The Grey Land", have begun to take their revenge.  For now, across the Island, children from the ages of 10 to 17 begin to disappear, leaving only their clothes behind, for three minutes and four seconds.  When, they reappear....nearly all of them are dead, and what's left of them is absolutely horrifying.

From the few survivors, it soon becomes clear what is happening: The Call, in which every child is once taken from Ireland into the Grey Land, where they are hunted for 24 hours....and any touch by a Sidhe, or the monsters of the Grey Land, can result in mutilation or death.  Those who survive rarely come back unharmed, often with strange and bizarre alterations to their bodies, to say nothing of the mental trauma.  At first, only one in every hundred child survives The Call, but Ireland quickly assembles "Survivors Colleges" to teach children skills, both physical and mental, to try and improve those odds, and now one in ten survive.

Nessa is a 14 year old, in her fifth year at a Survivor's College, the year they are most likely to experience The Call.  But no one gives Nessa a chance to survive, because Nessa has polio, and her legs are mostly useless.  And that's assuming Nessa can even survive the strange happenings - and the other children - around the college long enough to have her Call in the first place.......
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The Call is told from varying third person points of view, with each little segment of the story switching around to showcase the thoughts of nearly every character involved.  This is most apparent whenever a student gets Called, as the story switches to show that student's experience in The Grey Land.  But Nessa is quite clearly the main character, and most of the story is told from her third person point of view.

This works incredibly well to showcase the horror of the setting, in which children are not allowed essentially to be children, but are forced to endure training that can sometimes be downright brutal....and still nine out of every ten of them taken to the Grey Land die anyways.  And those that survive are often so traumatized they wish they hadn't survived...or worse.  Despite the shortness of this book, and the many many characters, this somehow allows O'Guilin to really demonstrate who these characters - from the children to the instructors - really are and the horror that faces them in this world.  I'm often annoyed by books and media that cut away from the story to flashback to minor characters' stories just before their deaths (if you've watched Bleach, that's a prime example), and The Call kind of does that to some extent, but it actually works here to increase the feeling of dread instilled in the reader.

Of course, this book does have a main character in Nessa, with several other characters getting a decent amount of focus as well.  Nessa is a naturally sympathetic protagonist given her physical handicap, but her anxious determination - to not only survive, but to not show any weakness whatsoever - in the face of everything makes her really strong as a heroine who you really desperately hope will find a way to survive.  Then there's her friend Megan, the bad girl who is the only person Nessa considers as her trusted friend, and Anto, her pacifist love interest who Nessa is afraid to admit she loves.

And then there's the antagonist Conor, the boy who's a bully who thinks of himself as the peak physical specimen, the one who should be King and should clearly survive the Call, and who has certain feelings towards Nessa.  At first, I thought the book was going to make him an extra obstacle for Nessa to overcome aside from the sidhe, but the book integrates his role with the rest of the plot till it reaches an ultimate conclusion, and it's both satisfying and gripping.

If I have a complaint about The Call, and it's not really a complaint about the book as my own comfort, is that I wish the characters' ages were about 1-2 years older than they actually were.  Nearly all of the major characters - instructors aside - are 14 years old (turning 15 by the end of the school year).  Despite this, characters sometimes seem to act as if they're 16-17, which results in say....a 14 year old and a 13 year old having sex off-page.  Given the context of what's happening with the series, it makes sense, but yeah that might be a reason to avoid this one if you're a little more squeamish than me.

So yeah, aside from that last bit above, if you're looking for horror, The Call is really really good in that department.  Its sequel is nominated for the new Lodestar award - the Hugo Award Equivalent for Best YA novel - so I will be getting to that....but after a short while, since I'm not sure I could handle two of these novels back to back.
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