CANR
WORK TITLE: Grist Mill Pond
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.christopherjyates.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
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LAST VOLUME: CA 389
http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/08/christopher-j-yates-black-chalk.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in London, England; immigrated to the United States, naturalized U.S. citizen, 2015; married Margi Conklin (a journalist).
EDUCATION:Graduate of Wadham College, Oxford University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer; former puzzle maker.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
After studying law at Oxford University and then working for puzzle magazines, Christopher J. Yates realized that what he really wanted to do was write novels. He decided to work toward that goal, giving himself a deadline: if he had not published a book by age forty, he would admit failure and try some other way of making a living. Yates worked steadily, completing the manuscripts of two novels that attracted favorable attention from agents but were rejected by editors. Though he held out more hope for his third novel, Black Chalk, it too received rejection slip after rejection slip—as many as fifty, as the author’s self-imposed deadline drew near. Yates steeled himself for a depressing fortieth birthday celebration, expecting to have to abandon his dream of becoming an author. But on the eve of this milestone birthday, he received an offer from a Russian publisher. Yates had, at the very last moment, achieved his goal: he could consider himself a novelist. He subsequently found an American publisher for the well-received Black Chalk.
Black Chalk is a psychological thriller in which a group of Oxford students create and play an intricate mind game. The game, which involves various dares, is designed to test participants’ willingness to endure humiliation. As Washington Post reviewer Dennis Drabelle observed, this game’s dares are not “your typical collegiate dares (drink yourself into a stupor, dash across the quad naked, etc.), but ones that tap into the roots of each contestant’s psyche.”
Subsidized with funds from a secret campus society, the game demands a hefty entrance fee from participants and offers a substantial cash prize to the winner. Motivated by money but also by peer pressure and by the thrill of confronting inner demons in an ever-escalating competition, the six friends agree to play along. But the game becomes increasingly creepy, with ultimate consequences that are devastating for all.
The story is told in flashbacks, fourteen years after the events, by an unreliable narrator plagued by guilt. He tells readers that he is urgently trying to confess, but he also calls himself a liar. He insists that someone is secretly entering his room and changing the story he is writing. He warns that the game has not really ended, and that he cannot escape its power until its machinations have finally exhausted themselves.
Commentators found much to admire in Black Chalk. On the Euro Crime website, Amanda C.M. Gillies deemed the novel “a superb read” with intriguing themes and the power to elicit from readers a “cringing empathy” for the characters embroiled in the game. Book Page reviewer Lizzie Davis praised Black Chalk as a “grippingly dark narrative … [that] creates calculated threads, knotted with friendship and romance, and slowly reveals frightening character traits for a thrilling read.” In a highly positive review for National Public Radio, Jason Sheehan stated that he loved the novel “deeply and weirdly” and that the book had hit him “like a sucker punch delivered slowly and with exquisite precision.” Describing Black Chalk as “a deliciously devious study of human behavior,” Huffington Post contributor Jaime Lubin found a sense of “hopeful paranoia” in the book, as evidenced in the narrator’s hermetic obsession with telling the story. “It’s an extremely unique approach,” said Lubin, “skeptical and wary of the larger universe—and sure to encourage the conspiracy theorists among us—and yet there remains an optimism inherent in the writing that, even if we’ve been betrayed in the past, some proof of the world’s goodness is sure to arrive any day now. We can’t be certain of people’s motives, but we shouldn’t stop trying to relate to them.”
Internet Review of Books contributor Dennis C. Rizzo, however, found Black Chalk “juicy” but frustrating. “Yates offers us a clutter of sound bites, mental flashes, retold tales, dialogue and recollections, switching points of view unmercifully,” said Rizzo, “yet just as with the players of the ‘game,’ the impulse to give up falls short, and you find yourself picking it up again ‘just to see.’” A writer for Kirkus Reviews made a similar point, finding much in the book unexplained or insufficiently developed—particularly its characterizations—yet enjoying the way in which the author “unravels his players’ safety nets—their minds—one roll of the dice at a time.” Disappointed with the book’s plot twists, which he described as “the stuff of conventional thrillers,” Blogcritics contributor Jack Goodstein said that for Black Chalk, “the journey, it turns out, is more interesting than the destination.” But Drabelle expressed unqualified praise for the novel in the Washington Post: “Like a locked-room mystery, a boarding-school or college novel reduces the world to a compartment filled with quasi-incestuous conflict. By adding gamesmanship and mental illness to the mix, Yates has achieved something new and impressive.”
Discussing Black Chalk with Paste Magazine interviewer Mack Hayden, Yates said: “I didn’t know everything that was going to happen, but I did like the idea of, as the writer, playing a game with the reader. I liked constantly challenging them to guess what was going to happen or see something before it was revealed.”
In 2017, Yates published his second novel, Grist Mill Road, labeled a “Must Read” by Entertainment Weekly. Told in Rashomon-style with different points of view of the same event, the story begins in 1982 in a small town in upstate New York where three adolescent friends—Patrick, Matthew, and Hannah—are involved in a senseless crime. Matthew tortured Hannah and shot her repeatedly with a BB gun, putting out one of her eyes, while Patrick watched, powerless to stop it. Twenty-six years later in 2008 in New York City, Hannah, an eye-patch wearing crime reporter, and Patrick, who has just lost his job, are married. They bump into Matthew, a wealthy investor. Each has a different interpretation of what happened those many years ago. With his “edgy, intelligent thriller,” readers’ sympathies shift between the characters as “Unexpected twists keep the tension high,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly. “Mesmerizing and impossible to put down, this novel demands full attention, full empathy, and full responsibility; in return it offers poignant insight into human fragility and resilience,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
“Shuffling and reshuffling one’s narrators has become almost a sport among suspense novelists, some of whom take it to excess,” noted Dennis Drabelle in Washington Post Book World Online. Fortunately, Yates tacks “back and forth in time, and from one narrator to another, with extraordinary skill. Some manipulators, you might say, are less manipulative than others.” On the Medium website, Zachary Houle likes that there is “a wholly interesting bisexual character who feels real and three-dimensional to a degree. In fact, all of the characters are fully human and flawed, which makes for an interesting read.”
In an article in New York Post, Yates explains how he based Hannah on reporters who work at the Post who deal with terrible crimes, “Cops and the reporters who cover them often share a bond. Hannah has a good friend, Detective Mike McCluskey, who echoes her black sense of humor—the comedy of resolve, of people who have to deal with the abhorrent every day.” Speaking with Marilyn Dahl on the Shelf Awareness website, Yates explained how long it took him to get the voices of the characters right: “Could I write three very different voices? Also, I lived in England until I was thirty-four years old and needed American voices. I thought I had set myself way too hard a challenge. But pushing yourself is good, being scared is good. When I finally heard these voices and got them down, they were the thing that kept me going every day.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2015, Christine Tran, review of Black Chalk, p. 31; November 1, 2017, Don Crinklaw, review of Grist Mill Road, p. 20.
Daily Mail (London, England), September 19, 2013, Katherine Whitbourn, review of Black Chalk.
Guardian (London, England), August 31, 2013, Jon O’Connell, review of Black Chalk.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2015, review of Black Chalk; October 15, 2017, review of Grist Mill Road.
Publishers Weekly, February 24, 2014, review of Black Chalk, p. 161; October 30, 2017, review of Grist Mill Road, p. 58.
Washington Post, August 18, 2015, Dennis Drabelle, review of Black Chalk.
ONLINE
Between the Covers, http://btweenthecovers.com/ (April 25, 2014), review of Black Chalk.
Blogcritics, http://blogcritics.org/ (August 3, 2015), review of Black Chalk.
Book Bag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (April 15, 2016), Lesley Mason, review of Black Chalk.
Book Page, https://bookpage.com/ (August 4, 2015), Lizzie Davis, review of Black Chalk.
Christopher J. Yates Website, http://www.christopherjyates.com (April 15, 2016).
Euro Crime, http:// eurocrime.co.uk/ (April 15, 2016), Amanda C.M. Gillies, review of Black Chalk.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (July 9, 2014), Jaime Lubin, interview with Yates.
Impact Online, http://www.impactnottingham.com/ (April 15, 2016), James Hamilton, review of Black Chalk.
Internet Review of Books, http://internetreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/ (September 13, 2015), Dennis C. Rizzo, review of Black Chalk.
Medium, https://medium.com/ (January 7, 2018), Zachary Houle, review of Grist Mill Road.
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/ (August 19, 2015), Jason Sheehan, review of Black Chalk.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (April 15, 2016), Joan M. Burda, review of Black Chalk.
New York Post, https://nypost.com/ (January 23, 2018), Modal Trigger, author interview.
Paste Magazine, http://www.pastemagazine.com/ (August 5, 2015), Mack Hayden, interview with Yates.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (January 12, 2018), Marilyn Dahl, author interview.
Washington Post Book World, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (January 12, 2018), Dennis Drabelle, review of Grist Mill Road.
Christopher J. Yates was born and raised in Kent and studied law at Oxford University before working as a puzzle editor in London. He now lives in New York City with his wife and dog. 'Black Chalk' is his debut novel.
You can read his blog posts on his website at: http://www.christopherjyates.com/
CHRISTOPHER J. YATES GAVE HIMSELF 10 YEARS TO PUBLISH A NOVEL
"THE REJECTIONS PILE GREW TWENTY-TALL, THIRTY-HIGH. . ."
January 5, 2018 By Christopher J. Yates Share:
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It was a one-decade deal. I’d given myself ten years to become a published novelist, and now my time was almost up. Three, two, one. . . The next day I would turn 40, an event that would seal my sense of failure. Tomorrow I was quitting writing for good.
Ten years earlier, aged 30, I had left my job at a a popular British magazine where I was the puzzles editor to become a novelist. It feels whimsical now. (That’s a euphemism for self-indulgent.) I lived in London and, suffering from perhaps the most severe hangover of my life, walking to work along the towpath of Regent’s Canal in Camden, I had a lightbulb moment.
Plot idea #357: astrophysicist who despises astrology decides to become an astrologer; using his scientific chops, he will prove to the world that star-signs are nonsense by employing statistics to better “predict the future” than any astrologer ever has.
People have thrown in their careers on more tenuous grounds. But not by much.
I called it Star Star. I know, I know, you want to track it down right now and order the hell out of that thing—space scientist crushes new age baloneyists—but alas the world of publishing didn’t share my certainty that the dismantlement of pseudoscience represented the future of the Great British novel. (Although I stand by every word of it, Aquarius!)
But that was OK. This was a decade-long project—my wife had a full-time job, I was making money freelancing while I wrote, and I still had seven years left.
My second novel, only half-completed, was Some Fandango. I threw it in the trash because the writing was even worse than the title, which is saying something. My third, Too Much Information (I will actually stand by that title until the day that I die), a novel about a man who could visualize the probabilities of various events, was almost good. The publishing world waved it away as if it were a bad smell.
And then I moved to the United States where my (American) wife had been offered a great job. I hoped this would be good for my writing—a change of scene, a new perspective. At this point, I had probably put in my 10,000 hours of grind as per Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. I was seven years into my self-imposed ten year limit. And then I had my best idea yet.
Six friends at Oxford University play a game of psychological dares. The challenges begin as childish pranks with silly forfeits for non-performance, but gradually the stakes grow higher and the game becomes intensely personal, a vicious struggle that results in tragedy. I called it Black Chalk, a dark title for a dark novel. I set half the tale in New York City—my new home—giving the story a terrified hermit for a narrator, a man reflecting bitterly on his role in the game all those years ago. He receives a phone call on the very first page. Someone has tracked him down. The game, it seems, is not over.
When I finished it was clear that Black Chalk represented a step change in the quality of my writing—my plotting, in particular, had improved dramatically. I was certain that here, at last, was the novel I was going to get published. I found an agent with almost no trouble at all, and out into the mysterious world of submissions went my manuscript. I imagined it returning to me fully bound and garlanded.
One rejection, two rejections, three. (They call them “passes” in publishing speak, as if you might be the delightful petit four at the end of a banquet that the editor can’t quite force down.) Five rejections, ten, fifteen. . .
At this point, my agent hinted to me that my agency could help me self-publish, which held all the appeal of several other self-s: hatred, mutilation, immolation. I turned instead to self-medication. The whiskey industry was mightily buoyed by my case of the blues.
The rejections pile grew twenty-tall, thirty-high. . .
My next self-would be self-analysis—I was nothing but a failure in life—which led me to the doors of actual analysis, and I started therapy. But as a stiff-upper-lipped Englishman this felt like another failure, and while I tried to battle my depression, the failures kept mounting. Forty rejections, fifty. . . It now seemed possible I might receive more passes in a year than any NFL wide receiver had ever managed.
My 40th birthday (aka “the deadline”) appeared on the horizon, and started to speed hell-for-metal toward me like a laser-guided missile. One month to go, one week. . . I headed off to Puerto Rico with my wife to celebrate. . . wait, to celebrate what exactly? The big “four-oh”? The big “I quit”? What was I going to do with my life when we returned from this vacation? My freelance work had dried up when I moved to the States, and how much longer could I ask my wife to keep supporting me? I had made no plan B, I had entrusted my future to a foolish bundle of dreams. (“There is no u in dreams,” the world seemed to whisper.)
The day before my 40th birthday, I woke up and blearily flipped open my laptop, an action that no longer signaled the beginning of a writing day, my computer now having become little more than a rejections mailbox. Hmm, but wait, there was an email from someone at my agency—not my agent, which was odd—and it bore a strangely surreal subject line. I opened it up:
Dear Christopher, I’m the foreign rights director here at DGLM and pleased to have the chance to work on BLACK CHALK. I’m very happy to say that we have a Russian offer for you. . .
What? But that didn’t make any sense. I read it again. Yes, extraordinary, a Russian publisher had offered to print Black Chalk, my novel, in Russian—a language I don’t even speak, a language so foreign to me, in fact, I can’t even comprehend its alphabet. The situation was so surreal that perhaps instead of replying “yes” I should have replied “trombone.” (OK, I replied “yes.”)
However, it didn’t matter that I wouldn’t be able to read my own novel, because one day before I was due to press the self-destruct button, the land of Tolstoy and Nabokov had decided that I was going to be a published author. It represented a light sprinkling of hope, just enough breadcrumbs to keep me going.
Two months later I received a less surreal message. One of the major UK publishing houses had made an offer for my novel. Decent sales in Britain led finally to a book deal in the US, where Black Chalk performed even better, and was named a Book of the Year by NPR. Now I have a second novel coming out in January, Grist Mill Road.
I’m an avid cook, and I have a strange sort of superpower in the kitchen. Whenever I set a timer, I almost always know when it’s about to go off. Something inside of me tugs at my eyes, I look up at the clock, and there it is counting down the last few seconds: three, two, one. . .
Ten years had seemed like an arbitrary deadline to set myself, but who knows, perhaps some mysterious part of me had known how long it would take for me to become a published author. Nine years, fifty-one weeks, six days.
Three, two, one. . . and liftoff.
Christopher J. Yates was born in London but brought up mostly in Kent. He studied Law at Wadham College, Oxford and then vacillated between the idea of a career in the law and working in puzzle magazines. After coming down on the side of the latter, he finally realised what he really wanted to do. Write.
He decided he would give himself until his fortieth birthday to attempt to achieve this dream. And then, just one day before turning forty, he found out that he was in fact going to become a published author. In Russia. (But that’s another story.)
‘Black Chalk’ is his first novel (click here to buy), and ‘Grist Mill Road’ his second (click here to buy).
He now lives in New York City with his wife, Margi. And also his furiously hungry dog, Mabel.
The Post inspired this badass new fiction character
By Christopher Yates January 13, 2018 | 11:53am
Modal Trigger
The Post inspired this badass new fiction character
"Grist Mill Road" is about a tabloid journalist with a style to match a paper such as the NY Post. New York Post
At 13, the heroine of my novel “Grist Mill Road” is the victim of a horrific crime. She is tied to a tree by a boy who then shoots her repeatedly with a BB gun, hitting her 37 times. Unconscious when she is rushed into surgery, Hannah awakes to discover the doctors have removed her left eye, a procedure known as enucleation.
Modal Trigger
Or, as she says: “I guess you could say my eye got nuked.”
Meet the darkly comic Hannah Jensen, victim of a violent act, eye-patch wearer and, now 39, crime reporter working the Big Apple beat. Once I realized my female lead was a New York City journalist, there was only one place Hannah could work — the New York Post. (Or as I call it in my novel, the New York Mail.)
Tabloids create a world of heroes and villains — you take a side, you pick a fight.
Pictures are blown up as big as life, the spleen exercised when necessary, headlines take aim at the gut.
The day after Charles Manson died, The Post screamed “EVIL DEAD” on its front page. Underneath, slightly smaller words blared: “Make room, Satan: Charles Manson is finally going to hell.”
Hannah could never have worked for a broadsheet like The New York Times, which strives to appeal to our intellect, a more rational reaction to horrific events. (Are victims of crimes supposed to react rationally?) Broadsheets and tabloids are like yin and yang, head and heart. After Charles Manson died, the Times ran the headline, “Charles Manson, 83, Killer Who Lingered In Culture, Is Dead.”
Every day Hannah pounds Gotham’s streets and walks the halls of 1 Police Plaza chatting up cops for the latest leads, her good eye twinkling at them. Too often in the world of popular entertainment the eye patch has symbolized villainy, but Hannah is quite the opposite — her eye patch makes subjects warm to her, sympathize with her. She even makes her own pirate jokes, owning her impairment, refusing to play the victim.
She adores the job of crime reporter: “That’s all I ever wanted to put down on the page,” Hannah says. “The tales of crimes solved, cases closed, and criminals punished.”
In developing Hannah’s character and voice, it helped to have the inside scoop on The Post, where several friends work, including my wife, and I leaned heavily on Michelle Gotthelf, who runs the newsroom. Michelle is the sweetest-seeming, hardest-swearing woman I’ve ever met and helped me out with questions ranging from NYPD helipad spots to the location of the Manhattan South homicide squad. She even explained police tape — vital because, as she told me, in 2009 the NYPD introduced an additional blue-and-white tape, “Police Line Do Not Cross.” However, because my scenes were set in 2008, I had to describe just one kind of tape: yellow, “Crime Scene Do Not Cross.”
How many angry letters and e-mails did that save me?
Cops and the reporters who cover them often share a bond. Hannah has a good friend, Detective Mike McCluskey, who echoes her black sense of humor — the comedy of resolve, of people who have to deal with the abhorrent every day. While McCluskey regales Hannah with the details of body parts found in a tub on the Lower East Side, grateful that the limbs weren’t strewn all over the apartment, he darkly reflects, “Well, at least whoever did this was good enough to take the bath part of bloodbath to heart.”
When Hannah’s childhood tormentor returns to her life 26 years later, she finally wants her own justice lit up in Technicolor. With McCluskey by her side, she heads back to Grist Mill Road, the scene of the original crime, to get closure.
McCluskey insists on doing all the talking and demands that Hannah speak the plan out loud to him.
“When we get there, I’m saying nothing, you do all the talking.”
“Praise be.”
“And then you’re going to shoot him in the eye.”
“Jeez, Hannah, are you f–king kidding me here?”
“Right, it’s a joke, Mike. I’m displaying my awesome ability to retain a sense of humor despite a difficult situation.”
Humor employed in difficult situations — what could be more tabloid than that. The Post’s most famous headline? “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”
The Writer's Life
Christopher J. Yates: Solving a Puzzle
photo: Circe
Christopher J. Yates was born in London and brought up mostly in Kent. He studied law at Wadham College, Oxford, and then vacillated between a career in law and working in puzzle magazines. After coming down on the side of the latter, he finally realized what he really wanted to do. Write. Black Chalk (2014) was his first novel; his second, Grist Mill Road, was just published by Picador. He lives in New York City with his wife, Margi, and his furiously hungry dog, Mabel.
After reading both of your novels, I can see that you are a master of the surprise, of playing with readers' minds. Did your work as a puzzle editor fine-tune this ability to be twisty (or twisted)?
Absolutely. I think of a plot as a puzzle I am setting for myself. When I started writing Grist Mill Road, I knew that a boy tied a girl to a tree and started shooting her with a BB gun, but I had no idea why. That was the puzzle. That's what kept me writing. I sat down and hoped each day would be the day when it came to me--why did this boy do this terrible thing? Or is he just a psychopath? I thought it would be more interesting if he wasn't a horrible psychopath, but I didn't know if that would be the case when I started writing. It actually took two years for Matthew's motive to jump into my head. I was getting quite worried. If I hadn't figured it out soon, then the novel would have been ruined. I didn't think a plain old psychopath was interesting. So I was starting to panic a little. That was a very exciting day! I solved my own puzzle.
Grist Mill Road has three narrators--Patrick (called Patch), Hannah and Matthew. Each has a distinct voice and manner. I wasn't expecting Hannah to be so funny, so wry. Was it difficult to write such distinct voices?
It was incredibly difficult, and referring to the last question, that was one of the puzzles I set for myself. Could I write three very different voices? Also, I lived in England until I was 34 years old and needed American voices. I thought I had set myself way too hard a challenge. But pushing yourself is good, being scared is good. When I finally heard these voices and got them down, they were the thing that kept me going every day.
Patrick's cooking is lovingly described--"the potatoes are perfect as well, first a quick smack of salt and then the crisp shell shattering down into light pillowy flesh." Are you a cook?
I am, and I used my experience of both cooking and learning to cook in writing the character of Patch. There's a section where you find out why he started cooking--his parents divorced and his mother has to go out to work, and she can't cook for her sons anymore, so she leaves them TV dinners. This was the same reason I started to cook. My parents divorced, and my sister and I were left to microwave meals. I decided I didn't like microwaved spaghetti Bolognese every night, so the answer was to learn to cook. And I've been cooking since I was 14.
Geology and cement, as well as food, are integral parts of the novel.
I'm a really keen hiker. The novel is set in a fictional place called the Swangums, which is based on a real place in upstate New York--Shawangunks. That's a word I thought would trip the reader up, so I changed it. It has some of the best rock climbing in the world and I'm fascinated by the rocks up there, so wanted to learn the geology.
As for cement, the town of Roseborn is based on two or three towns in the area. One of them is Rosendale, so my Roseborn cement is based on Rosendale cement. Again, it's just something I found interesting--how the cement was used to build the Brooklyn Bridge and parts of Grand Central Terminal. I liked the idea of nerdy interests, so often ascribed to men, being transferred to Hannah.
Are you working on another book?
I'm trying, yeah. There's a lot going on right now with promoting Grist Mill Road, but I do have 15,000 words and hopefully I can get back to working on that soon. --Marilyn Dahl
Grist Mill Road
Don Crinklaw
Booklist. 114.5 (Nov. 1, 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Grist Mill Road.
By Christopher J. Yates.
Jan. 2018.336p. Picador, $26 (9781250150288); e-book, $12.99 (9781250150318).
An antihero in an Albert Camus novel ignored a dying child's plea for help and spent the rest of his days pounded by guilt. Toward the end, he cried out to the little girl to come back "and give me a chance to save both of us." That's the entire point of this haunting, beautiful, and demanding novel. Patrick, barely into adolescence, stands by while his friend Matthew tortures young Hannah, eventually putting out her eye with BB pellets. Her eye socket, Patrick observes, "looked like it was housing a dark smashed plum." The rest of the novel is about the aftereffects of these grim few pages. Matthew becomes a wealthy investor, and Hannah becomes a newspaper reporter. Patrick, still trying to explain away why he did nothing to help Hannah, lives in a half-world of jobs that don't quite happen. Inevitably, the three reconnect almost three decades later, and the unfinished business has its final--and bloody--working out. And Patrick finally has a chance to save both of them. The intensity of the storytelling is exhilarating and unsettling.--Don Crinklaw
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Crinklaw, Don. "Grist Mill Road." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515382938/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=deef4efb. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515382938
Grist Mill Road
Publishers Weekly. 264.44 (Oct. 30, 2017): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Grist Mill Road
Christopher J. Yates. Picador, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-1-250-15028-8
Yates follows his well-received debut, Black Chalk, with an edgy, intelligent thriller that explores the aftermath of a senseless crime. In 1982,13-year-old Matthew Weaver ties Hannah Jensen, who's also 13, to a tree in the woods outside Roseborn, N.Y., and shoots her with a BB gun 49 times, including through the eye. Patrick "Patch" McConnell, a friend of Matthew's, is walking nearby and hears the shots. When Patch arrives at the scene, he at first thinks Hannah is dead, but she survives her injuries. Flash forward to 2008, when all three are living in New York City. Hannah, now a crime reporter, is married to Patch, who puts all his energies into his food blog and fantasizing about getting even with the boss who recently laid him off. A chance meeting with Matthew brings to the surface the anger and violence each has repressed. The reader's sympathies shift as each character brings a different perspective to the events that shaped them. Unexpected twists keep the tension high. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Grist Mill Road." Publishers Weekly, 30 Oct. 2017, p. 58. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514357740/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0466d76c. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514357740
Yates, Christopher J.: GRIST MILL ROAD
Kirkus Reviews. (Oct. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Yates, Christopher J. GRIST MILL ROAD Picador (Adult Fiction) $26.00 1, 9 ISBN: 978-1-250-15028-8
A defining moment of violence inextricably links the lives of three young adults in Yates' (Black Chalk, 2015) psychological thriller.
"I remember the gunshots made a wet sort of sound, phssh phssh phssh, and each time he hit her she screamed. Do the math and the whole thing probably went on for as long as 10 minutes. I just stood there and watched." Yates' novel begins with this visceral description that immediately establishes a complex relationship not only between Patrick, the narrator of these lines, and Matthew, his friend and the perpetrator, but also between memory and the truth. The novel cuts between a first-person narrative of Patrick at 12, documenting the events that led up to this shocking BB gun attack, and a third-person narrative of Patrick and his wife, Hannah, in 2008. As newlyweds, they are trying to find their way through the economic collapse and Patrick's loss of his job; Hannah is a reporter interested in writing a true-crime book. She is also the victim of the earlier crime, and while she knows about Patrick's connection to Matthew, she has no idea that he actually witnessed what happened and failed to stop it. Much of the book explores the ways in which they individually struggle to come to terms with and exorcise guilt before the past can destroy their present and future happiness. If this sounds complicated, it is--humanly complicated and narratively complicated--but successfully and movingly so. Yates manages to take a brutal incident and, by the end, create understanding for all three major characters involved: the victim, the perpetrator, and the witness. By doing so, he drives home the messages that truth is always subjective and that true, compassionate love is always redemptive. It's the compassion part, he argues, at which most of us tend to fail.
Mesmerizing and impossible to put down, this novel demands full attention, full empathy, and full responsibility; in return it offers poignant insight into human fragility and resilience.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Yates, Christopher J.: GRIST MILL ROAD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244122/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1441619d. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509244122
A Review of Christopher J. Yates’ “Grist Mill Road”
Tighten the Screws
“Grist Mill Road” Book Cover
(WARNING: Certain details in this review may be disturbing to some readers. If you’re squeamish, you might not want to read this review in full. These details are not about the book, but are in relation to a criticism with the book. I’ll warn you again when we get there, so you can click away if you want to.)
Christopher J. Yates made a name for himself as a cult author with his debut novel Black Chalk. The book was originally published in Yates’ home in the United Kingdom, but American book retailers handsold the import in such great numbers that Picador, a major publisher, picked up the book for the American market. Now, with Yates calling New York home, he’s come back with his sophomore novel, Grist Mill Road. Like Black Chalk, this is a novel that works best without knowing much in the way of a plot synopsis as red herrings abound. But if you need a sketch, the book partly takes place in 1982 in upstate New York, where three teenagers are drawn together by a relatively terrible crime. Flash forward to 2008, and two of the former teens are now husband and wife living in the Big Apple. Suddenly, the perpetrator of the crime comes back into their lives, with devastating consequences.
What I like about Yates is that his writing style reminds me of another Briton, the late, great Graham Joyce, just without the supernatural elements tossed in. Both writers have a gravitas to their writing, and a worn tone of voice. This is great because, with Joyce now sadly passed on, I have a new potentially favourite British writer to follow. The other thing that’s excellent about Grist Mill Road is that it has a wholly interesting bisexual character who feels real and three-dimensional to a degree. In fact, all of the characters are fully human and flawd, which makes for an interesting read. (Plus, one of them is a major foodie, which may cause you to drool over the dishes he concocts either in his mind or in his reality.)
However, the read is only lukewarmly interesting, and that’s due to a lack of severity in the book’s set-up. In it, a young girl is blinded by BB gun pellets that are shot at her. It’s terrible in a sense, because said character loses an eye, but it’s also not the most horrendous crime that one could dream up, which keeps the tension fairly muted until the explosive ending, when character motivations are finally revealed. I may be jaded on this front, because I come from a small town in Ontario, Canada, that was witness to a truly horrific crime involving teenagers in the early 1990s. You may want to shield your eyes here.
I personally knew a 16-year-old girl, let’s call her Sandra, who was a couple of years older than me. I was a mere acquaintance, but saw her around town working jobs in the movie theatre (before it closed) and a local supermarket. So I sort of knew her growing up, which made what happened to her completely devastating. Anyhow. Another slightly older than her classmate, let’s call him Jason, was secretly infatuated with Sandra, and both worked together in that supermarket. One night at closing time, Jason offered Sandra a lift home on his ATV. She never made it. Instead, Jason drove her in the opposite direction out to a small clearing along a torn-up railway bed that runs through the town. Once there, Jason bashed Sandra’s head in with a rock 18 times. She died from the trauma. Jason buried her.
Jason then went home, got some sleep, woke up the next morning and went back to the crime scene, where he dug up the corpse and proceeded to have sex with it. I’m not making this up — I wish I were. (And, yes, just thinking about this makes me want to lose those cookies I ate for lunch.) In any case, the body eventually was found and Jason was caught, but because he was six weeks shy of his 18th birthday when he committed these crimes, he only got three years in youth prison, whereas, if he’d been an adult, he would have gotten life with no chance of parole for 25 years. This case was so sensational that it played a partial but significant role in reforming Canada’s youth justice system so that 16- and 17-year-olds could be tried as adults for very serious crimes.
At this point you may be wondering what the point of my little diversion is in relation to Grist Mill Road. Well, having grown up in a small town where this horrific murder-rape took place, I found that the premise of this novel to be rather lacking in severity to a degree. I mean, it’s not great that a character loses an eye and has trauma over it, but there are — as my story proves — far, far worse crimes that could have been committed. So, along with Black Chalk, which had a similar problem of watering down certain elements of the plot, I found Grist Mill Road to be missing a premise that would really grip the reader by the throat. Yates, as an author, could tighten the screws up front a bit more, rather than waiting to the end of the book, in this case, to show how a seemingly banal crime where someone just loses an eye had its roots in more serious wanton criminality. I found that the crime used as an upfront plot device could have been way more effective in drawing the reader in by being graver.
There are other smaller issues with Grist Mill Road, too. Do you like reading about how cement is manufactured? Me neither, but there’s about a 10-page section in the novel’s middle which has fairly little bearing on the plot where we learn about different types of cement. I hate to say it, but this had me reaching for the snooze button. Also, one of the main characters of the book literally does a disappearing act midway through, only to reappear at the very end! (Does anyone remember The Last Starfighter where the main bad guy just ups and disappears halfway through the movie? Same sort of thing happens here.)
I don’t want to say that Grist Mill Road is a bad book. Even though it’s flawed, it’s still somewhat enjoyable. My advice would be to lower your expectations a bit, and then come to the novel with knowledge that the book really ends with a bang. I could imagine this book as a mid-budget Hollywood film, which could be what Grist Mill Road is destined to become, but, all in all, it’ll only be effective as a mild PG-13 rated thriller. I feel that Christopher J. Yates is really holding back to a degree, to which I say … “Let it go!” Yates is already a bit of a master at the plot twist, so, for his third book, if he could just ratchet the tension up a bit from the get-go, and we’d have one hell of a yarn to read. So some homework needs to be done, but I’m sure that Yates has a really great book sitting inside him somewhere. And if it’s about the evil that children (or young people) do to other youths, as his first two books are about, there’s one hell of a disturbing and completely debased story embedded in this review that anyone, Yates included, is free to steal. In any event, thought, what remains here is just a pretty partially warm read. Too bad, because it had some real potential.
Christopher J. Yates’ Grist Mill Road will be published by Picador on January 9, 2018.
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Books Review
Three lives forever linked by an act of violence in their shared past
By Dennis Drabelle January 12
At the beginning of Christopher J. Yates’s fine second novel, “Grist Mill Road,” Patrick “Patch” McConnell looks back on the summer of 1982 and what he took for an “ideal childhood . . . growing up in the best place on earth, probably still [believing] in ghosts, UFOs, tarot cards and the purity of major league baseball.” His “best place” is a town in the mountains 90 miles north of New York City. There, day after day, you would have found the 12-year-old Patch and his intimidating 14-year-old friend Matthew running wild without adult supervision.
“Grist Mill Road,” by Christopher J. Yates (Picador)
Then came an event that changed three lives. It can be encapsulated in a tabloid headline — BOY SHOOTS OUT GIRL’S EYE — but there was much more to it than that.
For one thing, the shooting was no accident. The perpetrator, Matthew, first tied 13-year-old Hannah to a tree, then picked up a BB gun and pumped pellet after pellet into her, 37 of them in all. Patch was there, too, having his Lord Jim moment — standing by, watching the attack in horror, but making no attempt to stop it, not even a verbal protest. With blood all over herself and one eye a pulpy mess, Hannah was left for dead. Later Patch sneaked back, found her still alive, untied her and sought help. In the aftermath, Matthew confessed to the crime, and the three young people went their separate ways. Ever since, Patch has been looking for a chance to redeem himself.
[Review of ‘Black Chalk,’ by Christopher J. Yates]
Lord Jim fled to the jungles of Southeast Asia, but Patch settled for Manhattan, where 26 years after the fact, the shooting takes on new meaning. By now Patch and Hannah are husband and wife — they met by chance in Grand Central Terminal some years back and eventually fell in love. (In case you’re wondering, she has a prosthetic eye that looks more real than the old glass ones.) Matthew reenters their lives first via the Internet, then in person; as before, he, Patch and Hannah make a volatile mix.
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The author Christopher Yates (Circe)
Yates now turns to questions that hark back to the summer of ’82. For example, why wasn’t Patch charged as an accomplice? And how could Hannah possibly marry someone who let her down so badly, second thoughts or not? The answer, in each case, is that her perception of the attack is quite different from Patch’s. He lives in fear of the day when she stumbles upon “the monstrous secret that paces the perimeter of our marriage, like something that prowls in the shadows, a dangerous creature awaiting its moments, the right time to strike.” Eventually, Patch will set out to disarm that “monstrous secret” — with disastrous results. Another question — not fully answered until the book’s final pages — is how Matthew could have done something so heinous.
Shuffling and reshuffling one’s narrators has become almost a sport among suspense novelists, some of whom take it to excess. This reader, for one, balked when Paula Hawkins in effect brought one of her characters in “The Girl on the Train” back from the dead, out of temporal sequence, to supply crucial information. Yates eschews such highhanded artifice, tacking back and forth in time, and from one narrator to another, with extraordinary skill. Some manipulators, you might say, are less manipulative than others.
Yates, who was born and raised in England and now lives in New York City, set his first novel, “Black Chalk,” mostly in his homeland. This time around, he demonstrates impressive knowledge of and affection for his adopted country while telling an even more compelling tale. Not least among his new book’s strengths is the light it sheds on the phenomenon of an otherwise law-abiding male giving in to volcanic rage.
Dennis Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World.
Read more:
The ten best thrillers of 2017
GRIST MILL ROAD
By Christopher J. Yates
Picador. 352 pp. $26