Martin Chatterton, Scorpion Falls, Ford Street Publishing, August 2022, 272 pp., RRP $18.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781922696090
Theo Sumner is a 14 year-old boy, who has, he tells us, never left his home town of Scorpion Falls. He sets out to tell his story in a first-person narrative, a style that allows the reader to experience some of Theo’s emotions in a powerful way. In places the work is almost metafictive as Theo draws the reader’s attention directly to the fact that he is writing the story and whether or not he is skilled at doing so.
Theo is a bit of a loner and is bullied at school. His mother is a single parent who, as far as Theo is aware, has multiple sclerosis. Why then does Theo’s friend Ari claim to have seen her running at the motel her parents own and where Theo works part-time? Is the sinister Frank Maker really Theo’s uncle as his mother claims? Theo is confronted with more questions than answers. He doesn’t know who to turn to when he sees what appears to be the abduction of two of his school fellows. In a recurring piece of intertextuality, Theo falls through the back of a wardrobe towards a noise that sounds to him like the roar of an African lion.
Here his courage and ingenuity are really tested as he embarks on an adventure to try to unravel the mystery that seems to be to be occurring in his town and particularly involves a sinister research institute. In another piece of intertextuality, during this wild adventure, Theo follows a confusing maze or labyrinth to an underground cavern where he is confronted by the Minotaur of Greek myth. By this stage even the reader is beginning to question how much is Theo’s imagination and how much is reality – or perhaps an indication of some mental illness from which Theo is suffering. The characters he encounters are well-drawn and, although some might seem a little far-fetched, in the context of Theo’s quest to find his apparently kidnapped school friends, they are all too believable.
This is a more complex book than it first appears, with many twists and turns in the plot. The ending comes as a surprise (although perhaps there are some hints that may get forgotten in the excitement of the story) and reveals the significance of the number 42 that appears throughout the book as the number of the motel room of the apparent villain of the story. Nothing to that point in the book is actually how it has seemed to the reader. An intriguing read!
Reviewed by Margot Hillel
