Published by Gollancz

Synopsis:

Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. It’s a pretty standard dried-up western town.

There’s a pawnshop (where someone lives in the basement and runs the store during the night). There’s a diner (although those folk who are just passing through tend not to linger). And there’s new resident: Manfred Bernardo, who thinks he’s found the perfect place to work in private (and who has secrets of his own).

If you stop at the one traffic light in town, then everything looks normal. But if you stay a while, you might learn the truth…

I’m a fan of Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series (far more than the TV series, past season 2 anyways), so after I saw that this series has been adapted for TV I thought I’d skip that step and just read the book instead.

Similar to the first book in the Stackhouse series, this is a meandering supernatural mystery that focuses on the strange residents of a small town. It’s only at the very end of the book that the action heats up and you get hit with a surprising ending.

My favourite thing about this book is the characters, they’re all the eccentric and distinctive personalities you’d expect to find in a small town, all with their own histories and secrets that will hopefully be spilled later on in the series. I love this kind of mix of rural characters and supernatural powers, it gives the book a really comforting gossipy feel and makes characters much easier to relate to.

This book is a bit of a slow burner to begin with, and I will admit that I struggled a bit to flow along with second person narrative ‘Manfred did this, Fiji did that’ but after a couple of chapters I eased into it, so if it’s something that you find difficult… stick with it. It’s worth it!

After reading this book, I’m curious as to whether I should start watching the TV series or just keep reading on – anyone read these books or seen the show yet? Any thoughts?