Pig Island

April 25, 2016
Hayder’s dark, inventive 2006 thriller begins as journalist Joe Oakes arrives on a secluded island off the western coast of Scotland to visit a reclusive cult on remote Pig Island. Joe is there to investigate a supposed half-animal, half-human creature distantly glimpsed in a tourist’s film, but his real interest is in the cult’s founder, Malachi Dove, who’s now living behind an impenetrable barricade topped by pig skulls. On the island, Joe, whose wife, Lexi, is unhappy and delusional, becomes infatuated with Malachi’s strange young daughter, Angeline. When cultists are murdered and Malachi goes missing, Joe and Lexi take Angeline to their London home, where trouble inevitably follows. Portions of the book are narrated by each of the three. For the well-born Lexi’s chapters, reader Crossley uses an upper-class British speech that shifts from sharp reality to almost lyrical fantasy. Angeline, a natural adapter, moves swiftly and easily from wild-child halting speech to the loquacious nattering of a normal raised teenager. But Crossley is at his performing best portraying rough-edged Joe as he stumbles through an assortment of intense emotions including fear, shock, helpless infatuation, self-disgust, jealousy, and, finally, despair. A Grove paperback.

Starred review from December 18, 2006
At the start of Hayder's profoundly creepy and creepily convincing thriller, hard-bitten journalist Joe Oakes arrives on the west coast of Scotland to visit a reclusive cult on remote Pig Island. Oakes hopes to investigate a supposed half-animal, half-human creature distantly glimpsed in a tourist's film and settle his long-held grudge against the cult's founder, charismatic crackpot Malachi Dove, who has long since withdrawn to his barricaded compound on Pig Island. In the ensuing mayhem, Oakes wins the confidence of Dove's mysterious daughter and learns the hard way that the investigative skills on which he prides himself are flimsy at best. Though gruesome enough to satisfy even the most hardcore horror fan, this rigorously imagined novel is also full of apt (if bleak) detail and graced with a perfect plot twist at story's end. Hayder (The Devil of Nanking
) offers both a riveting story and a nuanced, distinctly modern look at secrecy and publicity, belief and skepticism, normal and taboo, (in)sight and blindness.