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What Happens Now
by
Jeremy Dyson
Winter, 1981, and fifteen-year-old Alistair Black is wrestling with the fierce power of his imagination. The boundaries between what is real and what is fantasy are dissolving to increasingly dangerous effect. And then he falls in love with Alice . . .
WHAT HAPPENS NOW is a mesmerizing story about love, fear and faith. Atmospheric, suspenseful and spiked with black humour,...more
WHAT HAPPENS NOW is a mesmerizing story about love, fear and faith. Atmospheric, suspenseful and spiked with black humour,...more
Paperback, 311 pages
Published
by ABACUS
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Jeremy Dyson is one of the co-creators of The League of Gentlemen, although you won't have seen him on screen because he's the mysterious non-acting one. As you might expect, then, What Happens Now opens with a comically sinister scene in which a relatively mundane event terrifies a child. It's an excellent beginning, and establishes a recurring theme of the book: childhood fears of, on the face of it, relatively minor incidents having a long-lasting psychological impact well into the adult live...more
This Book is absolutely NOTHING like it seems from its cover. When I first began reading it I thought it was going to be immature, but after the first 70 pages the book takes a completely different turn. It's actaully very dark and confusing atsome times but it's worth reading. The events that occur when Alistair and Allison are 15 effect them for the rest of their lives and you get to see that in this book. To me the book really exemplifies how the decisions you make in your adolosecents define...more
That Jeremy Dyson is being published by smaller companies like Abacus and Canongate, rather than heavy-hitters like Simon & Schuster or even Penguin, is baffling to me. As far as I'm concerned, he's a master-class storyteller, with a beautiful, readable style and engaging tales to tell.
What Happens Now is the first novel I've read from Dyson (I'm counting The Haunted Book as a collection of stories rather than the long story it really is), and I couldn't read it fast enough. He built a full-...more
What Happens Now is the first novel I've read from Dyson (I'm counting The Haunted Book as a collection of stories rather than the long story it really is), and I couldn't read it fast enough. He built a full-...more
Ok: so it wasn't terrible, really. However, I did feel like I was reading a book for teenagers (something like Junk by Marvin Whatever or Judy Blume) rather than adults, which suggests to me that he has the tone of this book all wrong. The plot itself was interesting, although the twist was hardly twisting at all and the ending felt like the worst type of cliche. Apart from the main character (who is never fully explained - does he have some mental problems or what?) everyone else felt awfully 2...more
Last year I enjoyed Jeremy Dyson’s off-kilter, Roald-Dahl-gone-extra-bad visions in the short story collection ‘Never Trust a Rabbit’. I’d been intending to read more by him when I got the chance, so this year I snapped up his novel at the library.
With parts set in the 1980s, and hopping back and forth to the present day, ‘What Happens Now’ took a little while to get going, but that seemed to be a deliberate method to ease the reader into the inner worlds of screwed up minds and early teenage h...more
With parts set in the 1980s, and hopping back and forth to the present day, ‘What Happens Now’ took a little while to get going, but that seemed to be a deliberate method to ease the reader into the inner worlds of screwed up minds and early teenage h...more
Painful, tragic and compulsive reading. A slow start admittedly, but the sense of ease at first is perhaps what makes the conclusion all the more shocking.
Liked this until about two thirds of the way through where the author seemed to run out of ideas. Heavily influenced by early Ian McEwan (especially "The Cement Garden") but with an even more surreal edge. I think he's a better short story writer than a novelist
I prefer his short stories, but this is very readable.
Couldn't get into it :(
Jun 16, 2013
Damian Lawrence
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Jun 10, 2013
Sean
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Apr 07, 2013
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Feb 04, 2013
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