Matt Haig’s The Radleys answers the probably never asked question of: what do you do when you’re a vampire, but your parents have been hiding the truth from you? Even thought the prose was thin, I rather enjoyed reading this novel of an alternate England where vampires exist and the police have an Unnamed Predator Unit that tracks down the worst offenders. The Radleys are abstainers. To be more accurate, Helen Radley is an abstainer who has her husband towing the line. And the children don’t know what they are. They just think they’re weird kids who are always sick with something.
The opening of the novel introduces this family who are desperately trying to seem normal. It would be really easy to read this novel as a metaphor for how we all tamp down on our eccentricities so that we can fit in. Hell, that may have been the author’s intention for all I know. But I didn’t want to read it that way, primarily because it’s just too easy and I hate it when novels wear their morals on their sleeves.
The Radleys’ normalcy disappears over one action packed weekend when Clara’s true nature comes out when a boy tries to assault her. Her parents go into cover up mode and she and her brother have to come to terms with their monster status. All the family secrets come out into the open. Within a few chapters, we have quite the family drama going on only with, you know, bloodsucking and murder. I had a lot of fun this afternoon when I read it.
The only problem I have with the book I alluded to above. The writing is thin. The short chapters and punchy sentences are clearly part of the author’s style. But I found that the prose didn’t have a lot of depth to it. It was hard to sink into this world, though Haig does a great job of dropping hints about vampires in music and literature. Without real depth, though, it’s hard to really believe in this world. There just wasn’t enough detail.