The Chalk Man: A Novel

It’s 1986, and Eddie and his friends — FatGav, Hoppo, Mickey, and Nicky (the only girl) — spend much of their time playing together, as 12-year-olds are wont to do, at the playground and in the woods. It’s summer when they meet their new teacher, a strange man, an albino, who is thrown together with Eddie because of a weird and terrible accident and becomes a friend and mentor to Eddie. FatGav receives a set of sidewalk chalks for his birthday, and the kids start to leave signs for each other around town, but someone appropriates their chalk-men symbols and uses them for evil. A horrible murder occurs, and it changes everything for the kids and for their teacher.

C. J. Tudor’s debut novel almost hits the mark, but not quite. The writing is superb, but the switching back and forth between 1986 and present day sometimes makes it difficult to follow. Also, this takes place in England and might be a bit too British for American readers. That it’s told in first-person point of view by Eddie through an alcoholic haze in the beginnings of early onset Alzheimer’s accentuates some of these problems.