She pushes with all her might against it. “There is a rib of wood at her back stopping her. Pulling in her stomach, contorting her shoulders, she shimmies further and further into the cavity. “She holds her breath and tries to squeeze further along, her left arm outstretched towards the light, such as it is, a glow from the kitchen”. She squeezes into the dark space, pursuing a dot of light on the other side of the wall, beyond which, the neighbour’s party thrives. The hole becomes a cavity barely big enough to accommodate her. She begins picking at a dent in the kitchen wall. Whilst a party next door throbs through the walls, she drifts through her house with a ghostly lack of purpose. The novel opens with an evening in the lonely life of an elderly widow. In his seventh book, A Shock, Keith Ridgway is like a croupier, shuffling together southeast London lives and doling them out to the reader. Keith Ridgway’s A Shock and Leon Craig’s Parallel Hells
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |