It is well established that women are happy to read novels written by men but that male readers rarely extend a reciprocal courtesy. The late Mo Hayder is a case in point, since despite the extraordinary sales of the novels she wrote before her premature death in 2021, her fan base remains overwhelmingly female. It may be that the extreme violence often found in her books (‘lurid’ would not be unfair) strikes men as a trespass on what has traditionally been a male preserve. Whatever the reason, male reviewers tended to shy away – I know that, since I was one of them.
Yet just ten pages into Bonehead, her posthumously published novel, I found myself completely drawn into Hayder’s story and the haunted creepy world it depicts. Alex Mullins is a young policewoman who, after time in London spent with the Met, has come home to Gloucestershire to work locally and live with her mother. She also hopes to shed the inner demons triggered by a terrible accident two years earlier. A coach carrying former students on a class reunion swerved off the road into deep water, and most of the occupants drowned. Alex, though injured, was one of only seven survivors, along with her close friend Aaron, who has also joined the police. What haunts Alex, and brings her back to work in the countryside, is the image of a female figure she is convinced she saw on the road just before the coach’s fatal swerve.
The novel is told unusually – through the first-person voice of Alex that alternates with the third-person viewpoint of Aaron’s mother, Maryam. She is a woman of little confidence who has married a ‘catch’, but remains convinced she doesn’t deserve him. Like Alex, Maryam lives near woods said to be haunted by ‘Bonehead’, a mythic female whose presence there begins to seem more credible as strange things start happening in both households, including the disappearance of each family’s dog.
The mystery of the ghoulish face Alex thinks she saw slowly unravels; but the real interest of the novel is its exploration of the varying impacts the crash has had on the survivors and the families of those who died. We get to know Alex best, but though we grow attached to her and indeed to Maryam, it’s not that we particularly like either of them so much as they become familiar.
The writing is restrained but beautifully descriptive, the pace varied according to the tensions it is intended to create, and the plotting is – almost throughout – clever, even ingenious. I say ‘almost’ because the book’s climactic ending is both gruesome and unconvincing – the opposite of most finales of the genre. I cannot help but feel (as other reviewers have noted), that had the author had more time, she would have changed it.
Otherwise, the talent at work here is remarkable. Although Hayder’s death means there will be no more books from her, readers new to her work (yes, mainly men like me) have the consolation that there are 11 others to read.
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