Her Last Affair by John Searles

I’ve read the author before. It didn’t make an especially positive impression, but guess it wasn’t terrible either, so I figured I’d try again. Just now I’ve gone and revisited my old review of his other book and I remember nothing about it, at all. Then again, it’s been years. Thing is, I probably won’t remember much about this book either after a while. Which isn’t an outright condemnation of it, it’s simply to say it isn’t the kind of thing that etches itself on one’s memory and certainly not at the rates I read.
     Actually, it took me quite a long time to get into this book for the sheer fact of not liking any of the characters. And then I realized that what the author was doing was that Ruth Rendellian thing where you have unlikeable characters doing unpleasant things to each other but in a strangely compelling fashion. Everyone’s guilty of something, everyone’s got secrets, everyone’s desperate and lonely and tragic. It’s the darker side of dark psychological fiction. Going by the afterword, it sounds like the author was in a really dark place writing it and it shows. And the thing is…I quite like that sort of thing to read now and again. It’s a confirmation bias read, playing in oh so nicely into a misanthropic worldview.
     And so this is essentially a book about two people of the desperate, lonely, tragic variety who, along with their dark terrible secrets, get brought together by fate and circumstance. One needs a tenant i.e. company, one needs a safe shelter i.e. a chance to reinvent himself. There’s ugliness they both hide from, physical and otherwise, lots of it. A toxic brew, for sure, and it simmers and simmers first on two individual burners (spilling over and splashing others) and then in a combined pot and then boils over in an appropriately tragical manner.
     That’s the book, essentially. Vague as the description may be. Vague is probably best anyway, make for more surprising plot twists, of which there were few. A very dark, very bleak read, but a well executed atmospheric one. Oodles of drama. Some suspense too. Read if you’re in the mood. Thanks Netgalley.