The Book of Lost Things

Just finished John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things. Wow. Connolly is better known for very nasty yet poetic detective chasing serial killer fiction. I thought I could read near everything but his first book Every Dead Thing actually had me gasp a few chapters in and I put it away under a stack of other books tried to forget what I had read. About six months later I ran out of things to read and found it waiting for me. I carefully paged a bit after where I had put it down and found I could handle the rest, and ended with an appreciation for his talent. I’ve read all his books since then and most have been quite good. This latest book however comes as a shock of a different kind. Here he has turned a full 180 to write a fantasy, a dark fantasy with horrors afoot but something more playful and in the past I have found that these sorts of experiments by writers are usually more interesting than good. This is so much more than good.

David is a boy who has lost his mother despite his attempts to do everything right to keep her alive. As good as he has been, it hasn’t been good enough. When her voice calls to him to follow her to another world he does. It is a world in which he has to prove himself again and again and finds himself in the midst of familiar and yet strangely changed stories. In one, he meets seven small men who live with Snow White. It turns out that it is they who tried to poison her and blame it on the queen who unfortunately for them had been at that very moment poisoning someone else. Their sentence is to care for her as long as she wishes. She is a great fat ever hungry beast of a woman who waits for her prince to return for her. David also hears about the true end of Goldilocks whom the bears ate when she couldn’t leave their porridge alone. This makes the book sound playful but it is more than that. He survives adventures that would feel at home in the bloodiest of Clive Barker’s tales, Connolly’s years at describing evil and evil deeds serve him well in this horror quest, this knight’s narrative, this coming of age wonder. I hope this is a new direction for this writer.