Pig Island

by Mo Hayder Narrated by Steven Crossley

Overview

Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes, but when he visits a secretive religious cult on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. While investigating a strange apparition caught briefly on film wandering the lonely beaches of Pig Island, so deformed it can hardly be human, Oakes crosses a border of electrical fencing, toxin-filled oil drums, and pigs' skulls to infiltrate the territory of the group's isolated founder, Malachi Dove. The violent consequences of Oakes's transgression are so catastrophic that it forces him to question the nature of evil and to face a terrible reality: was Dove responsible for one of the bloodiest crimes Scotland has seen in years?

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review

Hayder's savage style ultimately serve[s] [its] purpose in a novel that taps into the current fascination with all things supernatural.

Boston Globe

Another astonishing mutation of the crime thriller . . . Hayder masterfully exposes not only the horror but also the human frailty at the story's core.

Publishers Weekly

At the start of Hayder's profoundly creepy and creepily convincing thriller, hard-bitten journalist Joe Oakes arrives on the west coast of Scotland to visit a reclusive cult on remote Pig Island. Oakes hopes to investigate a supposed half-animal, half-human creature distantly glimpsed in a tourist's film and settle his long-held grudge against the cult's founder, charismatic crackpot Malachi Dove, who has long since withdrawn to his barricaded compound on Pig Island. In the ensuing mayhem, Oakes wins the confidence of Dove's mysterious daughter and learns the hard way that the investigative skills on which he prides himself are flimsy at best. Though gruesome enough to satisfy even the most hardcore horror fan, this rigorously imagined novel is also full of apt (if bleak) detail and graced with a perfect plot twist at story's end. Hayder (The Devil of Nanking) offers both a riveting story and a nuanced, distinctly modern look at secrecy and publicity, belief and skepticism, normal and taboo, (in)sight and blindness. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

As a fledgling journalist, Joe Oakes wrote an expos of a faith healer and gained an enemy. Twenty years later, after building a career as a hoax-busting investigative journalist, Oakes hears new rumors about his nemesis, Malachi Dove, who lives on an island off of Scotland with his followers. Oakes finagles his way onto the island and uncovers horrific events. Even as he and his wife (who narrates some of the novel's middle chapters) try to help Dove's daughter overcome a physical malady, they become trapped in a deadly game. Hayder (The Devil of Nanking) skillfully builds suspense, developing her characters and creating a tense, oppressive atmosphere; the result is another creepy, suspenseful thriller. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/06.]-Beth Lindsay, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Evil stalks the inhabitants of a remote Scottish island in the bestselling British author's fourth in-your-face thriller (The Devil of Nanking, 2005, etc.). Pig Island is home to the religious cult Psychogenic Healing Ministries, whose members live safely apart from their founder Malachi Dove, a deranged visionary who holes up (rather like Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kurtz) in a valley behind a barricade festooned with severed pigs' heads. The possibility that the Psychogenics are practicing devil worship adds to the mix of elements of the classic British film The Wicker Man. Oh, and there's a not-exactly-human beast roaming the neighborhood-which could of course have been "created" by the island's former exploitation as a dumping-ground for chemical waste. These beguiling oddities attract the attention of hoax-busting reporter Joe Oakes (his earlier exposure of Pastor Dove's doings had forced the cult's flight to Pig Island), who travels to the site with his spunky wife Lexie, with whom he shares the narration. In the past, Hayder has masterfully toyed with readers' nerves, but here the big payoff fizzles: Neither the identity of The Creature nor the ponderous shock ending is nearly as surprising as the author seems to think. The novel is further flawed by more product placement than you'll see in your average California-inflected slacker flick. Hayder's use of outre plots, settings and characters is both the strength of her earlier fiction and the source of a formula that's rapidly hardening into cliche. When she's on, she's an adventurous, edgy, literate writer. This book is, alas, far from her best.

Publishers Weekly - Audio

04/25/2016
Hayder’s dark, inventive 2006 thriller begins as journalist Joe Oakes arrives on a secluded island off the western coast of Scotland to visit a reclusive cult on remote Pig Island. Joe is there to investigate a supposed half-animal, half-human creature distantly glimpsed in a tourist’s film, but his real interest is in the cult’s founder, Malachi Dove, who’s now living behind an impenetrable barricade topped by pig skulls. On the island, Joe, whose wife, Lexi, is unhappy and delusional, becomes infatuated with Malachi’s strange young daughter, Angeline. When cultists are murdered and Malachi goes missing, Joe and Lexi take Angeline to their London home, where trouble inevitably follows. Portions of the book are narrated by each of the three. For the well-born Lexi’s chapters, reader Crossley uses an upper-class British speech that shifts from sharp reality to almost lyrical fantasy. Angeline, a natural adapter, moves swiftly and easily from wild-child halting speech to the loquacious nattering of a normal raised teenager. But Crossley is at his performing best portraying rough-edged Joe as he stumbles through an assortment of intense emotions including fear, shock, helpless infatuation, self-disgust, jealousy, and, finally, despair. A Grove paperback. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

Pig Island mashes up the horror and detective fiction genres to create a fascinating and often unsettling book ... For a gruesome twist on the traditional mystery, this book will definitely deliver.”—Stephen Lovely, Murder & Mayhem  

Anna Mundow

Another astonishing mutation of the crime thriller . . . [Pig Island] masterfully exposes not only the horror but also the human frailty at the story’s core

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175608381
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	02/02/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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