Jonathan Sims - Family Business
4⭐
Genre: Horror, Fiction, Mystery, Contemporary Fiction, Paranormal, Thriller
Pages: 320
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Gollancz, Orion Books
Date Published: 13th October 2022
Big thanks to Orion Books for sending me a copy of this book to read and review.
Book Blurb:
But then she gets a new job: working at Slough & Sons, cleaning up after the recently deceased.
Clearing away the remains of lost lives, Diya begins to see things. Horrible things, that can’t be written off as imagination. Nothing is as it seems with the Sloughs.
It’s a dirty business, cleaning up after the dead, and if Diya’s not careful she might end up getting buried under the family tree.
My Review:
This book is so well written and
also captivating. I didn’t want to put it down until the very end when I finally
found out what is going on. Even then I was so surprised and even had that I didn’t
see that coming moment after finishing this book. Another perfect and at times
quite spooky and creepy book for the Autumn TBR.
The story follows Diya, who
recently lost her best friend and grief is taking over her life. She losses her
job, her relationship with her family is suffering and she distanced herself
from all of her friends. Mainly because it seems to her that no one understands
what she is going through and also because everyone is saying to her just to
move on with her life. If she moves on, however, she is afraid her friend’s
memory is going to fade, and Diya can’t let that happen.
A family-run cleaning business,
Slough & Sons offers Diya a very well-paid job. However, it isn’t your
average cleaning job, it requires you to clean up after the deceased. Diya
agrees to take a job in hope that it will give some sort of closure about her friend’s
death and will make her grief easier, especially seeing that other people are
going through a similar thing. As the days in the new job progress, Diya starts
to feel strange things are happening in jobs that the Sloughs family are asked
to do. She starts seeing visions of people’s last moments, which shows that
they haven’t died on their own. They all have been somehow murdered and any
traces of their identities are destroyed. Diya’s suspicions grow even higher
when no one in the Slough family wants to talk about their recently deceased
brother who Diya replaced in the business. Now Diya needs to find out what is
happening with all the supposedly murdered people, whilst also not getting
tangled in Slough’s family’s mess.
I really enjoyed this book,
especially Diya’s character. Throughout the book, she goes through so much,
firstly losing her best friend, then starting to have visions, and then finally
having to uncover what Sloughs are up to with their cleaning business. She is
such a likeable character that a reader can easily relate to her. She goes
through so many emotions and I liked how this book explored grief and losing
someone through her and through the Slough’s business. The Slough’s cleaning
business portrayed how easily we can forget the deceased, whilst Diya showed
that it is so important for their memory to live on in us. For me definitely,
this book was more than just a horror story but also had that additional layer
of important takeaway messages about loss, grief and death.
The only downside for me in this
book is that it was a really slow burn and the ending just happened very suddenly.
Although I enjoyed the ending, I wished that some parts of the book were paced
a bit quicker.
Overall: It is a very well-written
book that was so easy to read. It connects the reader to the characters and messages
it conveys with such ease, too. I also liked the suspense in this book that
keeps a reader engaged until the very end. It is a very interesting and rather
unique storyline with so many important and relevant topics discussed in this
book as well. I truly recommend it and I will be definitely reading more from
Jonathan Sims.
About the Author:
Jonathan Sims is a writer, performer and games designer whose work primarily focuses on the macabre, the grotesque, and the gentle touch of creeping dread. He is the mind and the voice behind acclaimed horror podcast The Magnus Archives, as well as story-game design duo MacGuffin & Co., and some of your favourite nightmares. He lives in Walthamstow with the two best cats and an overwhelming backlog of books that he really should get around to.
https://jonathan-sims.com/
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