Warning - This Review Contains Spoilers - Spoilers Section Will Be Warned Ahead Of Time
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
"In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he's put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead.
That's when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago."
The Chalk Man is a standalone mystery thriller novel by C.J. Tudor.
This was...okay, I guess? The story was good enough to keep me going but I did have issues with it.
This felt like more of a coming-of-age mystery than a mystery thriller for one thing as not once did I feel tense while listening to this. The characters you follow in their teenage years and then again when they are older are not the best people ever which makes connecting with them rather impossible. There are also some rather graphic scenes of the sexual assault of a 12 year old which wasn't easy to listen to and came out of nowhere.
Our MC as well does not escape the fire as he has tendencies that veer more on the unsettling side. He was a habitual stealer, even though he would deny it, but he did some extreme things. I will go into further details with spoilers. If you don't want to see the spoilers, skip ahead until you see the words spoilers finished.
Spoilers Ahead
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His stealing habit was serious enough to the point that he actually stole a ring off of a dead body. Yikes. To make things worse, in the end you find out that the reason the body that was found in the woods was missing its head was because he took that as well and has been storing it in a container for 20 years. Not my most favourite reveal ever.
The worst person of all though was our whodunnit, the Reverend himself who hid behind his preaching to shield him from the fact that he was in a relationship with a presumably underage girl. And when said girl got pregnant, he took it upon himself to kill her but accidentally ended killing the wrong person. On top of that, it was heavily implied that he also abused his daughter. I just can't stand characters like the Reverend who abuse their position of power.
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Spoilers Finished
There were also just things that happened in the book that felt like they didn't add much to the plot. There were brief mentions of a dog being poisoned and then dying, but it turned out to be nothing. I don't understand what this added to the plot at all, and it was probably better off left out.
Negatives aside, I thought that the narrator had a fantastic voice which definitely helped the listening experience, and the introduction to the story was extremely captivating. Things just fell a bit flat after such an explosive beginning.
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