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The Book of the Baku cover

The Book of the Baku by R.L. Boyle

(Titan Books, 2021)

Reviewed by Steven Doran

R.L. Boyle was born in Leeds. She studied there (Classical Civilisation), sang, played football, and today still lives in Yorkshire where she enjoys genre fiction, 80s movies and countryside comforts. Her debut novel mixes dark, social realism with YA horror, written in the great tradition of children going to live with estranged family and discovering something supernatural.

Sean is the book’s young hero. He leaves behind a children’s home and the poor estate he grew up on to live in with his wealthy grandfather. Years earlier Sean’s mother died in circumstances we’re left to wonder about, and which left him unable to speak. Yet his grandfather’s home—carpeted, smelling of home-cooked lasagne and stocked with books and art supplies—promises safety and comfort, and a chance to recover from trauma in his past.

It’s no quick fix. Things quickly start to spoil as Sean reads a children’s book written by his grandfather: The Book of the Baku. It’s filled with the nightmares of other children, who at various times in history offered them to the ancient, dream-eating Baku. Each night, the Baku plants one of these nightmares into Sean’s unconscious world.

While the Baku stalks him, Sean deals with an array of real-world problems. His grandfather enters into alcoholism. A group of local teens assault him. He’s isolated from the friends he grew up with but faces prejudice when trying to meet new ones. In a scene that’s relatable for anyone who has been told they need to get themselves ‘out there’, Sean is driven to a youth club. There, instead of joining in, he loiters unnoticed in the church hall’s vestibule, slipping away when he’s sure his grandad has driven off and passing silent hours in the unheated church next door.

But there’s hope, in the form of five baby hedgehogs. They are separated from their mother at birth. Sean rescues them. He weighs them, washes them, and feeds them every few hours even during the night. Their survival is against the odds and Sean’s disrupted sleep has tired him to exhaustion but trying is enough to show Sean he might be capable of the love and care he hasn’t received.

As we learn more about the sinister magic of the Baku, and as it exercises its cruel power over Sean’s world, Boyle also uncovers Sean’s story, piece by piece. Finally, he comes face to face with the monster and the memories he’s tried to hide from.

Boyle has done a great job of exploring mature and pertinent issues in a context of YA horror. The story navigates alcoholism, disability, bereavement and abuse in ways that are unsensational and enhanced by genre elements. Sean’s nightmares take the form of flash shorts, woven into the narrative so that it’s hard to distinguish dreams from the world Sean experiences while awake. Boyle is also adept at describing bodily and vegetable horror. In particular, images of decay fester throughout the book, as vines filled with blood or ink spread from his grandfather’s writing shed to infest the garden and house, though perhaps there is too much of this too soon.

The book’s real success is its representation of Sean. He is smart and resilient, and at the same time profoundly vulnerable; a child experiencing neglect, whose life is shaped by the loss of speech and a physical disability. When people meet Sean, these are the aspects they see first. But in Boyle’s telling he is not defined by this; to the reader, he is above all a kind friend, a caregiver and an artistic spirit.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.


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