Customer Reviews

Mister Kreasey's Demon

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Sensitive and kind to a giant of a simpleton in his class, Kreasey nevertheless gradually crumbles under the pressure of his street-hardened inner-London students who prefer to be mixed up with petty crime on the side walks rather than listening to his talk on the metaphysical poets. Enter, Amy, a colorful character and the one person sympathetic to her teacher. Kreasey comes to see Amy as his 'passport' to the guys he thinks are gathering to harm him. Their growing affection for each other is strained to the utmost by Kreasey's growing paranoia and the question at the heart of this novel is whether love and light can triumph over mental illness and moments of complete darkness for the village teacher thrown into the hard-hitting metropolis.

College days for me were in Greater London and I know what students from deprived homes can sometimes do to a college teacher if they don't like sitting in a chair and hearing about "The metaphysical poets" which is what Matt Kreasey has to get into their streetwise heads. He's much too sensitive, almost quaint, for his inner-city roughies and they soon run over him like a steam roller leaving him a nervous wreck. Maybe a familiar story so far but I reckon this book stands out for the way it sees into its characters from both sides of the desk and shows you how wrong you can be about many of the assumptions you can make - either as teacher or a student. Plus, the painful and strained romance between Kreasey and his young and poor student, Amy, is full of feelings you might never dream of flowering when you think of the run down and depressing streets where the students come from.

Matt Kreasey's humiliation at the hands of his streetwise London students conjured up for me the sheer rawness and edge which Nickford seems to achieve when he's observing his characters and, in this book, we have teenage students taking a sensitive paranoid teacher apart like a pack of wolves. When you expect that Matt would be reduced to hatred of those that taunt and threaten him, you still see a side of him which is, like many of Nickford's characters in his other novels, really tender.

Matt becomes fascinated by his young student, Amy, who in turn sees in him, not just an older man and her teacher, but the vulnerability of a man who it's true to say is a 'gentle' man. The interest might have ended here but the way Nickford explores the relationship leaves no compromise with false sentiment, nothing Mills and Boon, just honest emotion that really drew me into the story from the start.

Amy becomes Kreasey's 'passport' to the toughies who resent his closeness to her. Teachers are to be ground down to a pulp if they dare, like him, to give a lesson on 'Marvel and the Metaphysical poets' or try to bridge the gap between village teacher and some of the malcontents among inner-London backstreet students. But Amy brings to his flat more than her overdue essay and Nickford's observation of the relationship between a poor teenage girl from a deprived background, trying to help him cope with increasing paranoia, and a middle-class teacher from a quiet village, is masterfully done.

In places, I thought the tension almost too sustained. You need moments of calm, even if it's mental calm in a narrative to relieve the tension but for those who want to bite off the ends of their fingernails while getting some very raw character observation, this is a book to be swallowed whole.

The tension is ratcheted up as, just when you think Matt and Amy, teacher and student, are going to get through the ordeal, Kreasey's paranoia darkens his feelings for her and makes him wonder whether she, too, could be one of those voices he hears as he revisits the corridors of the empty college buildings at night to try to come to terms with the demons that keep him on Diazepam.

The night-time scenes in the dimmed and empty classrooms lit only by the glow of an orange neon lamp from the street outside and the taunting 'appearances' of chief bully 'Thickneck' and his sycophants let us right into the mind of a paranoid and I thought this is so well done that it's as chilling as the threat of the hunting knife that's coming for Kreasey.

What made me read to the end was to find out whether Kreasey would survive - not so much the knife or the collective beating - but his demons and, most of all, the one chance at love that could elude him.

Twists in the Tale (Psychological Suspense, the Supernatural and Ghosts S.)

You have to adjust to an unusual style but after the first chapter its precisely the newness of the voice that was key to what made me want to keep with the characters. Kreasey the sensitive, perhaps hyper-sensitive teacher, reduced to a husk of a being by his street-hardened students, is one of the best portraits I've ever found outside those teachers I knew when I was a student and some of the description rings chillingly true. When village teacher Mister Kreasey finds his teenage student, Amy, his only 'passport' to the hard urban world that his students inhabit, he moves clumsily into a romance with her and yet is constantly haunted by the outside suspicion that even Amy could be one of those who are planning his ultimate humiliation.
Enough has already been said in the book description about the storyline but what I would add is that often the minor characters are so unforgettable as individuals. I can't get out of my mind Amy Carter's seduction of the simple and stuttering giant of a lad, Philip, albeit in a disused railway carriage in a railway siding. Philip, being the only male student amongst all the others in Mr Kreasey's classes who trusts and admires Kreasey for his sensitivity and kindness, places a further strain on the relationship that has grown between Mister Kreasey and Amy as loyalties are divided, and Kreasey feels gutted by the seduction of his simpleton friend tricked and boozed up on cherry brandy by Amy.
Sometimes the characters stole so much of my attention that I missed some of the twists and turns and though the storytelling is good, it was the characters who made this book stand out.

Apart from what I thought were two minor minuses in the style, though this could be just me, I thought this was a gem of a storyline. In places I thought this was a bit too rich on description but I can't say it held up the plot which is what really kept me on board. The book delivers as a powerful and colourful character-driven story.
There's the bridging between older man, (teacher, Mr Kreasey) and younger woman (teenage student, Amy,) then there's the tension that the difference in social background provides. I don't like class words like working class and middle class, but these are differences which threaten the attraction that Kreasey and Amy find they have for each other in a danger-ridden narrative which otherwise threatens them both. Class divides and rags to riches themes have already been done brilliantly - but to death - by Catherine Cookson and Mister Kreasey's Demon, I have to say, has elements of these universal themes but...
From the start, Nickford's minute observation of character goes really deep and I soon felt involved. Coming back to the style, it is in places very detailed, no detail of setting or character overlooked if it heightens the character's individuality but, I suppose, it's this individuality that makes Raymond Nickford's style ultimately a refreshing break between the classics and best-sellers which can sometimes begin to tire with familiarity.

I sampled this novel first to see if the book description promised to deliver. The other picture of stately London that the tourist doesn't normally hear about, the godforsaken back streets of the south-east, like Lewisham, were unfamiliar to me because Raymond Nickford seems to keep mainly to parts of the capital where you might most expect teacher Kreasey's "demons" to come out of the woodwork, the demons being Kreasey's living nightmare about the gathering of his students from deprived homes.
Right or wrong, Mr Kreasey's convinced that his street-hardened students dislike of his gentle middle-class manners is going to bring out their knuckle-dusters and flick-knives, which is his students' way of teaching their unwanted teacher a lesson.

The nightmarish feeling that the author builds, with mounting constant threat of something very nasty around the corner for him, is very intense but it's sometimes beautifully relieved by the special understanding he strikes up for one of the students, Amy, who though also from a rough background, senses in her teacher a vulnerability, even though he's old enough to be her father.
It was the tenderness of such an unlikely and strained romance between two people who would otherwise seem as odd a mix as chalk and cheese that moved me and drew me firmly into this book, but I suppose the quality of the character observation and the writing which convinced me it was worth buying to read to the end.

A Child from the Wishing Well

This book escapes the usual neat prescriptions of genre. The author's background in Psychology seems to have helped him on a technical level with understanding the mind of a paranoid and the demons, real or imagined, are a wonderful study in the anxiety which probably visits most of us, even if only very occasionally in our lives.

So I'd be tempted to label this a psychological suspense. That having been said, the relationship between the paranoid teacher, Mister Kreasey and his streetwise teenage student, Amy, is unmistakably a romance. Yet the relationship, odd and even unlikely though it is, has a unique charm and depth of observation in the detail this author achieves.

Then again, the novel is full of a relentless wit that cuts through pretense and false sentiment like a razor, so it's definitely fair to say this is a literary thriller.

So... on what shelf do you put a book which is all three genres but never one in particular?
Having reached an ending which I found unforgettably tender and powerful, I'd say that, for me, I'd place this book on a shelf all of its own.

The hunting knife doesn't actually come and I didn't find this as horrific as I thought it was going to be. There's a couple of students who turn up with acid but you have to wait a while to see how far they use it on Mister Kreasey and this isn't, generally, what you'd call a 'hard-hitting' thriller.

The first chapters are atmospheric, yes tense, and bear the threat of something very nasty happening to 'sir' but the worst he gets is torment. This, though, is done brilliantly. This is more of a literary thriller. The characters come to life because of all the well chosen detail which the author has the knack of using to get right under the skin of each individual.

As a literary thriller and a moving story I was on board to the end, the end between Kreasey and Amy being raw and this, of all things, genuinely powerful.

A Child from the Wishing Well

Mister Kreasey's Demon first suggested to me a supernatural but the 'demon' is more an invention of the teacher's own troubled mind after taking the mental cruelty dished out to him by the street wise inner city students who are more interested in chewing him up than learning poetry from him.

The theme is universal but Raymond Nickford's treatment was for me what the book description couldn't say about it. The description only hints of Kreasey's being reduced to roaming through the dimly lit corridors of the college buildings where he has to teach. It can't describe the sheer eeriness and desolation of the man as he uses his master key to steal into the closed college buildings at night and roam the corridors, solo, until reaching the infamous room 239 where, by day, his students make mincemeat of the man too sensitive to teach them.

The subtlety in the way the author explores Kreasey's struggle to regain his confidence and then his awkward reaching out to Amy, his young student, also from the back streets, is for me the most satisfying thing about the book.

Anyone who knows the difference between the hardness of London's Lewisham and the relative gentility of Blackheath as the research reveals it, will again see why I say the theme is universal but the treatment is in a fresh and, for me, a powerful voice.

My only quibble is that I can't quite believe the author has actually measured the height of the walls to Royal Greenwich Park when he writes of the "gaunt twelve foot" high walls, but I know they stand much taller than I am and I'm a good six foot.

Until the end, you're never sure whether Kreasey's love for his student, Amy, will ever be able to blossom as he's haunted by the fear that she just might be another amongst the gathering of street-hardened students who, he believes, wish him some very nasty harm because of the social divide between them and their teacher who is more interested in poetry than small time street crime.

At times, Amy seems to be his only sanctuary from those who scheme to get him stressed out until he overdoses on his Diazepam tablets or walks into the wheels of a mysterious car on his way home from college at night. Yet at other times, she seems to hover over being in league with Kreasey's assassins.

I thought the subtle play on these two possibilities was so well done that it's impossible to put the book down until you get nearer the end. Even then, I was surprised by the ending. The book seems as much an insight into what acute anxiety can do to a teacher as it is about the depth of genuine feeling that can be achieved between an older man and a young college student, when the younger picks up on the mental frailty of the older.

It seemed clear from the Kindle sample that this was first definitely no campus stereotype but an original. It does begin at a gentle pace but this soon proves deceptive. From the start, the mystery of who's pursuing/haunting Kreasey really crept me out. The closed and dimly lit college buildings that Kreasey revisits in the night to face his 'demons' is one of the strangest and most eerie reads I can remember for a long time, so that although the pace is gradual, it's relentless, the tension all the time swelling up beneath until I sensed that either tragedy or the discovery of mutual love would finally take over.