Pig Island

by Mo Hayder

Overview

Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes. A born skeptic, he believes everything has a rational explanation. But when he visits a secretive religious community on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. Questions mount: Why has the community been accused of Satanism? What has happened to their leader, Pastor Malachi Dove? And perhaps most important, why will no one discuss the strange apparition seen wandering the lonely beaches of Pig Island? A confrontation, and its violent and bloody aftermath, is so catastrophic that it forces Oakes to question the nature of evil and whether he might not be responsible for a terrible crime himself.

In this compulsive and disturbing new novel, Britain’s “Queen of Fear” dares her readers to face their own fears head-on. Already a bestseller in the UK, Pig Island displays Mo Hayder’s transcendent brand of suspense in a book that won’t give you nightmares—because you won’t be able to sleep.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780002007139
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/27/2007
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

MO HAYDER is the author of the internationally bestselling novels Birdman, The Treatment, The Devil of Nanking, Pig Island, Ritual, Skin, Gone—which won the 2012 Edgar Award for best novel—Hanging Hill and Poppet. In 2011, she received the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award. She lives in the Cotswolds, England.

WEB: www.mohayder.net

FACEBOOK: AuthorMoHayder

Editorial Reviews

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

New York Times Book Review

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

Boston Globe

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film and settle his long-held grudge against the cult's founder, charismatic crackpot Malachi Dove, who has long since withdrawn to his barricaded compound on Pig Island.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.

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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  

From the Publisher

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

Anna Mundow