Blackmoor [Hardcover]

Edward Hogan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2008

Beth is an albino, half blind, and given to looking at the world out of the corner of her eye. Her neighbours in the Derbyshire town of Blackmoor have always thought she was 'touched', and when a series of bizarre happenings shake the very foundations of the village, they are confirmed in their opinion that Beth is an ill omen. The neighbours say that Beth eats dirt from the flowerbeds, and that smoke rises from her lawn. By the end of the year, she is dead. A decade later her son, Vincent, treated like a bad omen by his father George is living in a pleasant suburb miles from Blackmoor. There the bird-watching teenager stumbles towards the buried secrets of his mother's life and death in the abandoned village. It's the story of a community that fell apart, a young woman whose face didn't fit, and a past that refuses to go away.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hogan's writing is so forceful that the extraordinary elements of his plot are made utterly convincing, and more mundane aspects sparkle under his acute observation. Vincent enjoys the 'blind affection' of a slug he allows to climb on him, 'the searching of its beaded horns across his finger'; Beth feels that an empty room 'crushes her like water pressure.' The strength of the imagery supports the non-linear narrative; when the reasons behind the strange state of affairs are revealed, they slot into place with satisfying plausibility. But Hogan refrains from offering complete explanations of why things are as they are, a restraint which respects the complexity of the causes and effects that form individuals, families and communities, and the doubts that remain in the minds of the characters. In this powerful and sensitive novel, twenty-eight-year-old Hogan has achieved a striking debut"- Times Literary Supplement

"The novel seeps into your mind like the subterranean gas beneath the village. It's hard to shake."- Nottingham Evening Post

"While the delivery is graceful, the sense of understated, growing menace is what really holds this book together...As everything else crumbles, the elements of [Vincent's] teenage world start to slot into place, bringing warmth to an already deeply felt novel."- New Statesman

"There's a subtle magic to Hogan's prose, and a passionate concern for the part of the world where this novel is based, which invites comparisons with D.H. Lawrence - but that would be lazy...it has confidence, mystery and an entrancing sense of itself."- Independent on Sunday

About the Author

Edward Hogan is 26 years old and a graduate of the MA creative writing course at UEA and a recipient of the David Higham Award. BLACKMOOR is his first novel. He is a teacher and lives in London. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847370985
• ISBN-13: 978-1847370983
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,042,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nothing To It, May 23, 2011

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Blackmoor (Hardcover)

This book - which I hesitate to quite dub a novel - is an extreme example of a couple rather irritating features of modern fiction: 1.) A lovely, intriguing concept, bolstered by glowing puffs by reviewers followed by, not poor execution, but no execution. Without giving anything particular away from what is supposed and touted to be a sort of mystery novel, there is nothing mysterious revealed here at all. Further, there is absolutely no suspense or mystery at all in Blackmoor itself, the book or the town. Indeed, the book might be accurately described as a scraping away, from the first chapter to the last, of whatever sense of mystery or suspense the reader feels. The novella-length book is far too short for the characters to develop any psychological depth whatsoever. So, Beth, Vincent and George all leave the reader not with a feeling of lingering mystery, but simple emptiness. There never was anything to them after all. 2.) Creative writing class prose which, indeed, offers ever so many pretty sentences, but the sentences don't connect to anything more substantial than themselves, or perhaps a hastily penned atmosphere, which feels as shallow as the characters herein. In other words, what this book lacks is depth of any sort.

Two stars for the pretty, in spots, prose. But this is a book that is as soon forgotten as it is closed.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars `Most of the time, the drugs coated her like a cormorant in an oil slick.', November 11, 2009

By 

J. Cameron-Smith "Expect the Unexpected" (ACT, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blackmoor (Paperback)

The story opens as Vincent Cartwright enters his teenage years. Vincent leads his awkward, bullied life, not far from the site of Blackmoor, a former Derbyshire pit village that no longer exists. The life and death of his mother Beth in that same village has always been a dark secret about which Vincent's farther George does not speak.
What happened in Blackmoor? What happened to the village, to its community and to Beth Cartwright? As Vincent grows older, he becomes more curious about the past and seeks to find out the truth behind his mother's life and death in this mysterious, abandoned mining village.

This book moves between the present - where Vincent and his father George struggle to deal with life a decade after Beth's death, and the past and the events leading to Beth's death. This is a moving story about a young woman who was different and the causes and consequences of not belonging. This is also a story of a teenager seeking for answers.

I found the writing in this debut novel wonderful, and I look forward to reading more of Mr Hogan's work. This novel won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelists in 2009.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith