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.

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.

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:	2940175669818
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	02/02/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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