The secret hurts of childhood, the grudges long held from slights real or imaginary, the betrayals of love - these are his primary investigations. ''A Prayer for the Dying,'' his fifth and most self-consciously literary novel (it is written in the second person), comes closest to classic horror - an undertaker contending with a diphtheria outbreak succumbs to Gothic impulses - but the worst of it takes place in the man's soul.įor O'Nan's characters, interior demons are far more frightening than anything from the beyond. ''Snow Angels,'' O'Nan's first novel, is framed by the discovery of a corpse, but the murder is secondary to the coming-of-age story at the book's core. Rather than indulge in the excesses of the supernatural, he uses the terrors of everyday life - nightmares, violent crimes, wars - as a channel to the most intimate reaches of the human mind.
But unlike King, he never loses his grasp on reality. O'Nan has inherited from King an acute sensitivity to the vein of horror beneath even the most prosaic settings. The homage is unavoidable in O'Nan's third novel, ''The Speed Queen'': the narrator, a young woman on death row, dictates her story into a tape destined for an unnamed writer whose books include ''Carrie'' and ''The Shining.'' Even O'Nan's recent foray into nonfiction, ''The Circus Fire,'' bears the prints of the macabre: it recounts, often in gruesome detail, a deadly blaze at a Ringling Brothers show in the 1940's. In ''The Names of the Dead,'' O'Nan's second novel, a book by King winks at the reader from a nightstand. (Aug.Like a jack-in-the-box with a broken spring, Stephen King keeps popping up in Stewart O'Nan's work.
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But Wallender is still a solid character, whose strengths and weaknesses are utterly credible, and Mankell (who now lives in Mozambique) knows how to make the most of his virtues. Murray's work on Faceless Killers-often seems excessively deadpan. Third might be Thompson's translation, which-unlike Steven T. Second is the book's length-560 pages is a long haul, even with three exotic settings and dozens of important characters. The first is the Day of the Jackal syndrome: we know that Mandela wasn't killed by KGB agents or white Afrikaner terrorists, and that knowledge makes the suspense writer's job even harder. But several factors render this effort less compelling than its predecessor. Wallender is a classically dour but dedicated policeman whose progress through his cases is a combination of hard slogging and lucky breaks. This novel, written in 1993, links the murder of a real estate agent in Wallender's town of Ystad to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela has just been released from prison, and to Russia, where the KGB is busy planning Mandela's fate.
Faceless Killers (1997), the first of his books about provincial police inspector Kurt Wallender to appear here, involved Turkish immigrants and Eastern European villains. Like his countrymen Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Mankell writes mysteries that connect crimes in Sweden to the rest of the world.
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