David Temple is a journalist – well, a photojournalist, with a grisly specialism; he specialises in crime and accident photography, so there’s lots to do, especially in his resident city of London. The book starts on New Year’s Eve; David is unexpectedly called to dash out of the Knightsbridge pub where he’s drinking to photograph a bloody dive from a hotel balcony – whether a possible suicide, accident or even a murder, the resulting photos are newsworthy because the diver ‘might be famous’. He makes his way to the scene: it’s a film producer by the name of Rupert Wreath who is now a twisted wreck on the pavement, but after he has discharged his professional duties, David is fascinated by a woman whom he sees approaching Wreath’s body (a police cordon is not forthcoming here). The woman then quite nonchalantly exits the scene – barefoot – heading through the perpetual rain to a nearby hotel bar. Intrigued, David follows.
And thus begins Sick & Beautiful, an intricate, grisly and existential horror story about horror stories. The book does a lot: it’s a deliberation on the creative process, a blurring of boundaries between real life and imagined worlds and an often caustic, cynical picking-apart of fame and its trappings. But, threading through it all, this is an impressive piece of world-building in its own right, with moments of direct homage and reference to horror melding with new, graphic, alarming ideas. It’s London as only a Londoner – born or adopted – could know it, but it comes overlaid with a heady, nightmarish other London, and much more besides.
David approaches the strange woman – Rachel Garland – and they talk, a conversation which marks the beginning of a frenetic, frustrating connection between them. They first discuss the accident (accident?) and Rachel’s self-perceived role in it. A verbose, abstract conversationalist, the claims she makes about Wreath’s accident are outlandish, supernatural even: this would be alarming enough, perhaps, but David has had similar experiences to the ones she describes; this all feels fated somehow. In particular, he has dreamed of a similar figure to one she mentions: a ghostly man, distinctively dressed in a bowler hat, who seemed to be trying to communicate with him. David is a jaded figure, but he feels an irrevocable pull towards Rachel and the story of her life, seeing something significant in it. And of course, this journalist has always wanted to be a novelist; he believes he has now found his creative angle, his muse even. A new life – of one kind or another – beckons. But it comes at a cost: Rachel’s mysterious, horrifying visions begin to overtake his life too, eroding his memory and his own sense of self, criss-crossing between his waking and dreaming states. The ‘Paradise’ which soon overshadows his work on the book and consumes his thoughts is an ambiguous prospect: is it a place? A state of being? Or a curse?
This is a carefully-constructed book which sculpts its otherworldly atmosphere out of fantasy, nightmare, flashback and impression. Written in the first person, it is through the character of David – clever, damaged, ambitious and vulnerable – that we must unpack real from unreal, or else, drift along with the book’s slowly-unfolding lessons. Despite the different kind of narrative voice used, I couldn’t help but think of Steppenwolf in places: a man in existential crisis, a mysterious woman, a tantalising invitation to a semi-mythical and profoundly self-altering place, a painful search for meaning. This comes with some Clive Barker elements – surely we can use Barkerian as an adjective by now? – as Sick & Beautiful unleashes moments of pure, physical horror; peeling faces, lacerated torsos and glistening wounds. Being a London novel, it’s appropriate that the book comes with an array of compelling names – Wreaths, Garlands, Temples, even a Scythe – just as Dickens might have written, and the dark, glowering, rain-soaked London of the book doesn’t feel a million miles away from the literary London underworld of the Victorian era, either, save for the neon and the high-rises. These are all very literary characters, too: people use elaborate turns of phrase, or open with introspective, multi-clausal salvos which don’t ordinarily feature in polite conversation. Well, it depends who you talk to, of course. This is all entirely in keeping with the style of the book overall, as it’s beautifully written – elaborate but not gaudy – and a piece of artistic endeavour used to debate the idea of artistic endeavour.
David makes connections between life, death and entertainment throughout, not least by his self-reflective comments on the lot of an author. Crises have cinematic qualities; tragic real-life deaths turn into spectacles, like modern-day public executions; the narrative becomes a script which becomes a narrative again. In many ways the book within the book – also titled Sick & Beautiful – serves as an intermediary between life and art. Rachel, its inspiration, makes claims which could be real, or could be fake. She’s an actress, or so she says: what’s more open to debate is where the world of film breaks with the world around them. Knowledge of the horror genre, by the by, is everywhere here, with titles and scenes from well-known movies edging into the world of the book, punctuating it with a moment’s real-world respite. That’s author Jim Queen’s core audience here: the kind of people who could see a description of a scene from Braindead (1992) as a welcome reprieve. So of course, horror film fans would find a great deal to admire in this novel. Sick & Beautiful is vast and ambitious in scale, with a weaving, cyclical structure, dark flashes of humour and some sickly moments of pathos, too. It’s mesmerising, weird and provocative.