Customer Reviews

A Writer's Life

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Daniel, an established but struggling novelist, deep in a relationship with a woman he loves but who has difficulty loving him in return, discovers and is immediately entranced by the writings of an older novelist, Vaughan Edwards, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances a few years ago. But it seems Edwards semi-plagiarized his works from a writer active in the Victorian/Edwardian era ...

This is a genuinely engrossing tale, quietly but beautifully written -- a ghost story that proves in the outcome to be about something stranger than ghosts, and also about the complications of love. In a sense it's a Lovecraftian piece, and it certainly builds up that sort of atmosphere, although it (mercifully!) lacks Lovecraft's desperate stylistic excesses. And any writer reading this book will recognize that it is also, as the title implies, about the writing life. Great stuff!

Review copied from Amazon UK:

By
Thomas Jarrett - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Writer's Life (Kindle Edition)

Daniel Ellis, a mid-level Yorkshire writer, lives with his lukewarm partner Mina. After reading a brief encyclopedia entry on author Edward Vaughans an obsessive investigation of the author's life and works is started, empowered by the similarity of the pair's writing. This obsession goes from charmingly parochial to dangerously intrusive as elements of the arcane-infatuated Vaughan's life are uncovered that were best left fallow. The pace of the tale is like a snowball pushed downhill, the deceptively modest start building up speed and mass as it rolls. Powerful and unusual events gather around this humble core to construct a story of scope and vision, as intricate as a snowflake, the domestic start highlighting exactly how unusual and perilous these events are to an everyday-man like Daniel Ellis.