I really
wanted to like Beyond Fear.
I bought it
at a conference – selected it from literally dozens of other choices because I was
very taken with the author, Jaye Ford, and what she had to say about her novel.
She’s an intelligent, well spoken, attractive person with a very good sense of
humour. A former journalist who once fronted her own national sports show, she sure
knows how to engage an audience. I was also taken with the idea for her novel
and how she came to write it. Beyond Fear is a ‘stand-alone’ crime thriller
with a female heroine (Jodie) who is thrust suddenly into a terrifying
situation while away on a girls’ weekend at an isolated cottage shehas
rented. There’s also a personal history aspect of the set up. Jodie suffered a
horrifying attack as a teenager. She had escaped but her best friend was gang
raped in front of her and then murdered after Jodie escaped. Ford spoke about
how the idea came from a real case she’d read about in the newspapers years
before and which had stayed with her - a girl who had got away from an attack
when her friend did not. She’d wanted to explore what life would be like for a
person like that 20 years on. And after she spoke, I wanted to read what she’d
come up with.
And in the
first few chapters I was not disappointed. They were seriously spooky, and I do
not spook that easily. A couple of women standing beside a country road in the
dark waiting to be picked up. But their lift doesn’t come and they become
increasing frightened. Later, they are safely (ha!) at their destination – an
old barn converted to holiday accommodation - but Jodie becomes aware of people
and vehicles prowling about in the night. Something is terribly wrong; they in
danger. She knows it. But her friends won’t take her seriously. It was quite well
done and had me a tad unnerved, jumping at the sound of possums on my roof. In
the first quarter of Beyond Fear I thought Ford had very successfully created
of a sense of foreboding, creeping malevolence and tension.
Sadly it wasn’t
maintained. What didn’t I like? Lots of things, unfortunately. It ended up
being very predictable after the baddies showed their true colours and the
action began. This was in chapter 18. After that there were 22 chapters of
people running about in the dark, hitting, shooting, stabbing, shouting and
threatening each other. What started out as tension filled and spooky, played
itself out by the numbers as biff, bam, boom action.
I don’t
mind action. But this was not that well done and some parts were terribly slow
moving. Just two examples: from page 263 to page 300 (37 pages!) the heroes are
locked in a cupboard crying, arguing and freaking out. This is an absurdly long
time! Then on page 315 Jodie and her love interest Matt make a break for it,
trying to get to some bush that is just 20 metres away. Matt has a sore leg, but
even so it still should not take until the end of page 317 – almost three full
pages or approximately 600 words – for them to stagger there. That’s about 30
words for every step they make. This scene (and others) reminded me of Kill-Bill
– with its comic book style ultra slow motion action.
The
violence in Beyond Fear reminded me of a video game. Awful things are done
repeatedly to human bodies, but they just keep getting up and fighting on. I’d
love to have time to go back and count the number of times Jodie is stomped on,
punched, slapped, kicked, thrown on the ground, tied up. She even gets stabbed.
It’s just too much and becomes repetitive and unrealistic.
So too are
the logistics. The action is set around, in and under a large barn that has
been converted to a house. For 22 chapters the characters are all over the
place, inside and outside, through various rooms multiple times, out in the yards
and surrounding bush and back inside again. A large hole is ripped in the floor
boards mid way through, so the characters are in and out of the large cavity
under the house as well. It’s very confusing and annoying to keep track of. Jaye
Ford credits her teenage son with helping her keep track of all of this. Wish
he’d been there to help me.
And the
dialogue, especially from the baddies, was woeful. I couldn’t shake the image
of that nice lady I met at the conference dropping her voice to sound like the
rough, tough, and uncultured thug she isn’t and saying things she imagines bad
men say like: “We do the bitches first.”
“It’s no fun if they don’t fight.” Ford’s baddies call each other “’Bro”
(yes, they are brothers) like American gangbangers. They scream, “bitch!” at the women over and again and
call them “prickteaser”. They refer to Jodie as “the tough bitch” over and over like
it’s her name. This all made me cringe.
The plot is
absurd in places. One of the baddies was suspected of murdering a teenage girl
many years before when he lived in the barn. A search team had been involved
and they’d scoured the area and found nothing. Somehow, we find out late in the
text, they missed finding the four bodies buried under the barn. Sorry, but the
police are not as inept as that.
The baddies
have also just killed a man and need to get out of the area. So they’ve
returned to the barn to dig up some guns they buried there years before and which
are worth a lot of money. For some reason it can’t wait until after the weekend
when the women will leave and the house will be empty, so they will have to
murder them all. But, if it’s so urgent, why were the baddies drinking at the
pub when the women first arrived in town and not digging up their guns and
getting away? Then, when the baddies arrive back at the barn later that night
and find the women there, why do they wait until the next afternoon to make
their move? Instead of acting immediately, they lurk around the garden and
drive their scary growling car around and around the barn in the dead of night
scaring Jodie witless for no apparent reason. It was pretty creepy at the time,
but then later on makes no sense at all.
Then
there’s the silliest bit of all. After being trapped in the cupboard with her
annoying friends for 37 pages, Jodie escapes. She just needs to run for ten
minutes (she’s a fitness enthusiast) to a farmhouse down the road to call the
police and tell them two maniacs have three friends locked inside and intend to
rape and murder them. If that’s not enough, one is bleeding from a serious
bullet wound. It’s a very urgent, serious situation, but Jodie won’t go for
help. She just won’t do it. As a teenager she ran away from rapist murderers
and her friend got murdered. She’s vowed never to leave a friend again. So she
opts not to go and call the police and ambulance. Instead sheruns back into the
situation without notifying anyone, with no weapons, no real plan and little hope against
two armed thugs. Some friend! She’s also a mother who at several points
expresses sadness that her children will grow up without her because she’s
bound to get killed, but still she must be an idiot against all odds in honour
of the memory of a lost teenage friend. I’m sorry, but I’m a mother. It did not
seem real to me.
And then
there’s the romance. Jaye Ford’s first ambition had been to be a romance
novelist. It’s pretty important in Beyond
Fear as well. It’s a bit cheesy. A bit too obvious. A bit too “romance
novel” for me. I also didn’t like the blend of graphic description of sexual
violence and murder (told in flashback) which really was quite awful.
Shockingly awful. With the fact that this ended up being a light weight romance
novel. I think if you’re going to do graphic sexual violence you have to make
it a supremely serious book, not a book where readers are enjoying Mills and
Boon type sexy fantasies a few pages on.
Beyond Fear left me with a lot of questions. Why
was it published? Jaye Ford is a brand new author and this is Random House. Do
you have any idea how hard it is to get published in this climate as a first
time author? And she’d landed a fabulous agent before that – Curtis Brown, one
of the best known in the country. Is it just me? Do I just not get it? Am I
just jealous?
Well I am
jealous, of course!
But no, it
isn’t just me. Beyond Fear was circulated to readers on the website Soup, which
is basically an online opinion sharing, word of mouth, market testing kind of
thing. Two hundred and Forty Three reviews from regular readers – people with
no affiliation to agents, publishers or authors and no fear of ruffling the
wrong feathers - were loaded up. The average rating was 3.7 out of 5, which is
a pretty poor rating. Reading through the results, there was a lot of
polarisation. Many gave 4 star and 5 star reviews, but there were an awful lot
of threes and twos and even ones. Here are some quotes I pulled out from among the
poor reviews:
“very obvious ...no twists and turns”
“The writing needs to allow the reader to feel the fear, not tell them to be scared and that it is scary.”
“a
bit simplistic... no build up... just constant tension It would be a nice read
sitting by the pool sipping coctails.”
“Probably a bit more subtlety, nothing was left to the imagination.”
“The story was not at all believable. I just found myself questioning what I was reading constantly.”
“It
was a bit of a average read. It took a while to get into the plot and it was
very predicatable as to where it was going. It also seemed to go around in
circles.”
“I
really wanted to like this book, to support a new Australian author, but I'm
sorry, it just isn't happening. I was very surprised that the first chapter was
published as is. The character introductions in this chapter were just awful
and it was just generally sloppily written.”
“
it is really difficult to like these women - paranoid, vacant, disloyal and
hysterical - and much harder to really care what happens to them. Beyond Fear
is a chick lit/thriller that will appeal to readers with simple tastes. The
storytelling lacks the tension and drama of great thrillers, and the characters
are largely underdeveloped and uninteresting.”
“Beyond
Fear started off as a compelling page-turner. However, it quickly became annoying.”
“the
dialogue was repetitive.”
“The
style was very green, which led the mind to ponder the processes of the author,
rather than be submerged in the world of the story the author was telling.”
Recommended
for ”someone who doesn't generally read much and who just wants something to
kill time, like on a flight"
“There
was no natural suspense all the events leading up to the main event felt a bit
forced and stereotyped.”
“For
a thriller it needed more suspense”
“Sometimes
it felt like it was written for people who couldn't keep up”
“I
thought it started off a bit too childish, reminded me of girls carrying on at
high school. It was also a very predictable story line, there wasn't really any
surprises which is what I look for in a thriller/crime book.”
“The
dialogue was repetitive and naive”
And
one last one that made me laugh, a reader who thought there should be “more
violence”!
You can look for yourself, here:
So what is
going on? I would have thought most first time authors would be sent packing if they presented a
manuscript like this to a publisher or even to an agent. Perhaps Curtis Brown
and Random House saw in Jaye Ford what I did – a very impressive woman who can
really sell her book. She certainly sold it to me, even if I didn’t like it
when I actually read it. And picking books that will sell easily is bread and
butter to publishers and agents.
It is so hard to get published as a first time author. Women writers in particular get a raw deal as writers of crime. So when something like Beyond Fear gets published by a major publisher, there is this pressure to fall in behind it publically and celebrate it. And then whisper quietly to our friends not to bother... Or post genuine 'ordinary punter' reviews like those that appear on the Soup site...
My review
might well be the only bad review of this book you find on the net. The people who will read this book - women who enjoy crime and want to read the work of women - will want it to be a cracking read. But what is the effect of supporting a
dreadful book? For one, the myth that this is what women want to read (and
think is good crime writing) is perpetuated. Men wouldn’t touch this
book with a barge pole and must think women are fools if they take it
seriously. Yet the conspiracy of silence says we do... Meanwhile intellegent, gritty women’s crime writing struggles to find a publisher and cowers further
into the margins. And women wonder why female crime writing is so overlooked by the blokes in awards such as the Ned Kellies.
Sorry
folks, this one was not for me.
