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Overview
"A powerful novel of psychological suspense by a young writer hailed as 'Scotland's answer to Roddy Doyle.'"—Cosmopolitan
Rob and Karen Catto are a newly married young couple settling into their lives together on the northeast coast of Scotland. Rob's job as a janitor at the local school involves him in both the lives of his students and issues of security. So he takes sharp notice of a hulking figure in a parka lurking around the edges of the school, leering through windows, and squatting in an abandoned concrete bunker. As unpleasant and unsettling incidents multiply, Rob's suspicions tilt into obsession. It is time for a showdown. Time to confront Bunker Man . . .
A powerful, terrifying tale of horror and breakdown from an extraordinarily gifted young writer a smashing American debut.
Synopsis
"A powerful novel of psychological suspense by a young writer hailed as 'Scotland's answer to Roddy Doyle.'"—Cosmopolitan
Publishers Weekly
When newlywed Rob Catto moves to his wife's hometown on the Scottish coast and takes a job as head janitor in the local school, he discovers a mysterious vagrant who spends days in the woods behind the schoolyard, nights in an abandoned seaside bunker. At first an object of horror, the bunker man soon becomes an alter ego to Rob, the incarnation of his own sadistic fantasies. Often disturbing (especially in its graphic descriptions of Rob's affair with a desperately lonely 14-year-old who hopes to find love by living up to her reputation as a "slag"), McClean's prose races along at breakneck speed, pausing only briefly to establish Rob's sympathetic qualities before it plunges him into depravity. McClean, the Scot whose 1993 story collection Bucket of Tongues won the Somerset Maugham Award, has crafted a gripping novelfull of anger, fear and brutally mysogynistic sexabout an unimportant man who invests himself with sickening power. Author tour. (May) FYI: McLean founded The Clocktower Press in Edinburgh to publish fledgling Scottish writers. A staunch fan of Texas swing music, he wrote a book about his travels in that state that will be published in Britain in August.
Editorials
Tibor Fischer - The Times [London]
“Another massive blow against the supremacy of literary London. . . . What really gives the book its charge is its powerful sense of menace.”The Times [London] -
“Another massive blow against the supremacy of literary London. . . . What really gives the book its charge is its powerful sense of menace.”Publishers Weekly
When newlywed Rob Catto moves to his wife's hometown on the Scottish coast and takes a job as head janitor in the local school, he discovers a mysterious vagrant who spends days in the woods behind the schoolyard, nights in an abandoned seaside bunker. At first an object of horror, the bunker man soon becomes an alter ego to Rob, the incarnation of his own sadistic fantasies. Often disturbing especially in its graphic descriptions of Rob's affair with a desperately lonely 14-year-old who hopes to find love by living up to her reputation as a "slag", McClean's prose races along at breakneck speed, pausing only briefly to establish Rob's sympathetic qualities before it plunges him into depravity. McClean, the Scot whose 1993 story collection Bucket of Tongues won the Somerset Maugham Award, has crafted a gripping novelfull of anger, fear and brutally mysogynistic sexabout an unimportant man who invests himself with sickening power. Author tour. May FYI: McLean founded The Clocktower Press in Edinburgh to publish fledgling Scottish writers. A staunch fan of Texas swing music, he wrote a book about his travels in that state that will be published in Britain in August.Library Journal
In this new work from Scottish author MacLean, whose story collection, Bucket of Tongues, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1993, newlyweds Rob and Karen Catto set up house in a Scottish town where Rob is the new head janitor at a local school. For no apparent reason, Rob quickly degenerates into the school's resident lunatic and pervert. Obsessed with the notion that a vagrant living in an abandoned concrete bunker on the grounds poses a physical and moral danger to the students (even the one Rob himself is having an affair with), he sets out to trap "Bunker Man" and save the children. Given Rob's complete lack of cunning, the only mystery is why the others fail to notice his painfully obvious dementia from the start. Sluggish, pointless, and predictable, the plot leads to an inconclusive and unsatisfying ending. Not recommended.Lori Dunn, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Troy, N.C.Kirkus Reviews
The same deep-seated anger that fueled his award-winning debut story collection, Bucket Of Tongues (1994), also burns hot in Scottish writer McLean's first novel to appear here. But the rage against women in this tale of a janitor gone berserk is heavy- handed and finally not dramaticallly justified.Head school janitor Rob Catto has a lot going for him in the small Scottish town he calls home. But the new job, his sexy, adoring bride, and the cozy house they're in the process of repainting don't seem to be enough to keep him from sliding into an obsession that turns increasingly vicious. When a suspicious hooded man is seen near the school grounds, Rob appoints himself judge and jury to track down and punish the "pervert," a decision that seems to set a nasty chain of events in motion. He accuses his wife Karen of being unfaithful, for no reason whatsoever, then begins a dangerous, abusive affair with a willing student, who mistakes his attention for affection; all while Rob continues sending increasingly outrageous law-and-order memos to the head of the school. In the midst of this frenetic activity, he meets the lurker, Bunker Man, who turns out to be a gentle, bird-watching homeless man living in a seaside WW II gun emplacement. Rob befriends him, but only so that he can more effectively frame him as the depraved sex criminal he needs for his vigilante notion of justice to work; when the backlash from his memos results in a humiliating dressing-down from his boss, Rob springs his trap—and heartsick, innocent Karen is the bait.
While the acts of rage here are powerful and palpable, the motivations behind them are damningly obscure, and so flawed a foundation reduces the wholel to a tabloid tale—excessive, unpalatable, and confusing.