Review: The Tower by Simon Clark

The chimes continued, a shimmering sound that evoked a shimmering bell given voice by a muffled striker.

I picked up Simon Clarks The Tower from the bargain bin of my local bookshop the other day. My reason for picking it was basically that Clark is apparently a British Fantasy Award winner, and the BFAs are an award I tend to trust.

Unfortunately, it seems that the BFAs led me astray in this instance, and perhaps I should have given more consideration to why this novel was in the bargain bin the first place. Clark is the author of several other novels, none of which Ive read, so this was my first foray into his oeuvre. Unfortunately, Im not certain that, after making my way through this recent effort, Id bother again.

The Tower is a horror novel set in gloomy Yorkshire, and opens with a few motley members of a wannabe rock band arriving at an erstwhile nursing home known as The Tower. The band has vague ideas about spending their time at The Tower practicing their songs in order to prepare for an upcoming recording session, but of course, things start to go horribly wrong. I wish I could say that The Tower was an exciting novel full of complex twists and turns, or that it at least made me feel the slightest sense of dread. Rather, this novel careened along at a painfully staccato place, avoiding providing anything that might make me care at all about any of the characters or their ordeal. The narrative is all over the place, and feels hackneyed and derivative, and after a while Clarks short, sharp prose feels like a hammer to the brain. The book is rife with typos and repeated phrases (such as the repetition of shimmering in the quote above), and it gets tiresome quite quickly.

While this is a fast read, clocking in at 352 pages of half-line sentences, you might be better off spending your evening reading one of the classics of the genre instead.