This man can write, really he can, but how does he sleep at night after conjuring up these plots? Does he dream the scenarios up? Or should I say, nightmare them up? I bet people he meets think he’s such a nice boy…
It’s when you read his biography that you realise that Carter has a lot of grist to inform his mill, or indeed his writing. Chris Carter studied psychology and criminal behaviour at the University of Michigan. As a member of the Michigan State District Attorney’s Criminal Psychology team he interviewed and studied a great many criminals – it shows. He now lives in London.
So perhaps no dark dreams, just a knowledge of how the criminal mind might work. Knowing a few policeman I am aware they all have a few cases they can’t erase from their minds, so in Gallery of the Dead when an LAPD lieutenant tells Detectives Hunter and Garcia of the Ultra-Violent Crimes unit: ‘Thirty seven years in the force, and if I was allowed to choose just one thing to erase from my mind, what’s inside that room would be it’ as they arrive at a crime scene, you know it’s going to be a bad ‘un.
It is, but such a damn good novel, and totally addictive.
The serial killer who has created this nightmare scene needs the combined forces of the FBI and Hunter and Garcia to even get close to stopping the escalating creativity of his appalling acts. This is a psychopath whose work could win the Turner Prize, it’s so artistic and weird.
For one who used to hide behind the sofa watching Quatermass and the Pit (don’t bother if you’re young, you won’t even have heard of it) this was a book I should have read in small bits, and then sniffed smelling salts. But it is so addictive, so pacey and well written that I gulped it down, page after page, but not last thing at night. Oh no, this is a daylight read for me, but you might be made of sterner stuff.
The structure is sound, tension is on overload, and the characters of Hunter and Garcia empathetic, the other characters live and breathe, except the dead ones of course and Carter ‘gets’ the women .
Gallery of the Dead by Chris Carter hb. £16.99 pub Simon and Schuster.