Book Review Revisited – The Only Child by Andrew Pyper
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(Review 1 of 2 featured for The Only Child, with Jennifer Sullivan providing the other one today! This originally was posted to Goodreads on November 14, 2018)
Title: The Only Child
Author: Andrew Pyper
Release date: May 23, 2017
“She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.”
With that opening line burrowing in your head, ‘The Only Child’ kicks off. What a ride.
If you follow me on Twitter, you have undoubtedly come across any number of my tweets stating how Andrew Pyper is my favourite author. I have shared this tale before, but I stumbled across Mr. Pyper’s work in Walmart of all places.
Leading up to reading ‘The Only Child’, I randomly read ‘Vlad the Impaler’ and ‘The Resurrectionist.’ In hindsight, I truly couldn’t recommend two books better to read beforehand than those.
‘The Only Child’ reads like a horror book, wrapped in a dark psychological drama, wrapped in an ongoing ‘Where in the World is Carmen Santiago?’ – action adventure. I read this in three sittings (only because I had to travel for work so saved it for the plane) and the number of phenomenal cliff-hangers in this book is amazing. You will be flipping the pages frantically, being pulled ever further into this amazing alternative history tale.
The story follows the main character Lily, haunted by the visions she sees of her mother’s death all those years ago in their tiny cabin in Alaska. Now working as a psychiatrist at a criminal centre in New York, she is assigned a curious admission. A man who tells her he is the true-life inspiration behind Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This patient tells Lily that he is over 200 hundred years old. Then the cat and mouse game begins.
One of the numerous gifts the author has is the ability to transport you to an exact location and allow you to feel the street under your feet, the buzz of surrounding traffic and people, and the smallest details that let your fingertips to actually feel the environment. His ability to use minimal words to convey maximal emotion will make you gasp time and time again.
Until reading this book, my favourite book of all-time was easily his 2006 release The Wildfire Season. Until reading this book, it was. ‘The Only Child’ transfixed me from sentence one and never let go. I found myself pausing at points and using google street view, only to find the exact description I had read was so accurate I would be smiling.
The entire book is a sprint, a trip around the world that ends with a dramatic and action-packed finale. Sometimes you can go home again, and in this case Andrew Pyper shows why you must and what secrets still lay buried.
I couldn’t recommend this book more. 5 star ratings are sometimes inadequate and in this case it falls far short of what I want to rate it.
If you haven’t read any of Andrew Pyper’s work, please, please fix that ASAP, and this would be a fantastic place to start.
