Six Stories: A Thriller: 1

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Horrible, right? We should have done something about it, shouldn’t we? We were fifteen; that’s what I have to keep reminding myself when I think about that day. We were just stupid children." I really enjoyed all the different perspectives that were presented and the slow piecing together of what happened. As a reader, you begin to question things and doubt what you thought you knew until the ending totally blows you away. I know it's basically just a little spit in the vast ocean that is fandom life, but seriously, I've never devoured or waited for a book to come out in my life like I do MW's. Six is not interested in treating the trauma the queens each suffered as real and meaningful, not when there are fun bops to be made out of it. Six is not interested in telling its audience anything about the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII beyond the details of their marriages, not when their marriages were so dramatic and exciting. King has journeyed to the small town of Ergath on the north east coast of England, to investigate the grisly murder of Elizabeth Barton, a beauty and lifestyle YouTube vlogger. Elizabeth was participating in a viral internet challenge, the Dead in Six Days challenge, where participants were set a dare by a vampire. They had to do the dare and then pass it on, or the vampire would own their soul. But Elizabeth refused to pass on the dare, wanting to do each dare herself until the sixth day when she would supposedly meet the vampire herself.

huge thank you goes to Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for putting together the blog tour for Demon by Matt Wesolowski, as well as to Orenda Books and Matt Wesolowski for the gifted digital copy, which publishes in June 2022 in Canada. years ago, in the quaint, picturesque village of Ussalthwaite, Yorkshire (fictional location), twelve-year-old Sydney Parsons was heinously murdered by two boys his own age. No reason was ever given for this crime, and the boys who killed him, known as the ‘Demonic Duo,’ were imprisoned until their release in 2002, when they were each given new identities and lifetime anonymity. Told in a series of interviews with people who knew the woman and the young men convicted of her murder, Beast explores the dark secrets of a struggling small town. The author artfully gives us glimpses of a dark truth, obscured by deceit, weakness and outright malice. He has a brilliant ear for local dialogue, for the rhythm and cadence of genuine speech. And he builds an unnerving, oppressive atmosphere through a wonderfully creepy set of encounters with a sinister spirit who stalks the shadows.The six people within the vicinity of Tom Jeffries that fateful night, twenty years earlier, are interviewed in an effort to unravel his mysterious death. The varying perspectives lend the plot twists, skew the attempts at nailing down a timeline, foil the flow of truth and manage to drum-up some doubt. What was absent was any inkling of feelings for these characters, on my part. To be blunt, I just didn’t care enough. Maybe it was the shorter length of the book or the fact that it was almost entirely a question and answer format ( am I contradicting myself now?) that hindered any sort of emotional connection on my end. On a camping trip 20 years ago in eerie Scarclaw Fell, 15 year old Tom Jeffries went missing. His body turned up a year later. While police didn’t entertain murder at the time, his story made headlines and became a national sensation. The story is an intriguing one. The beast of the East snow storm of 2018. A dead vlogger. A dangerous following. An old tale of Vampires. Three culprits. A foreboding tower. The darkness this story creates is threatening and ever lingering. It creeps up on you and you don’t notice until it’s too late. Supernatural or something far darker, something more human? Well I guess you’re just going to have to read the book/podcast. I bow to the podcast thriller master and I will be counting the days until we find out what case Scott King will decide to investigate next... In the mean time, I will just fill my time pestering everyone who hasn't read this series yet. And yes, that includes YOU if you haven't! Because the sheer brilliance of each experience with this series is something that nobody should miss out on. This podcast thing, I had to find out about that. I listen to the radio when not reading/watching movies/listening to music/feeding cats/etc and I thought what is this big deal about a podcast. Then I realised 2 things –

And as the old adage goes, there’s always two sides to every story. In this case there are six sides, each with its own flavour and perspective, highlighting the many different narratives that coexist side by side. At the end of the day, the narrative that is told by the strongest person/s is the one that generally becomes the ‘truth’. King/Wesolowski challenge the accepted narrative by giving voice to the the ones who are often the voiceless in an effort to illuminate the many versions of the ‘truth’. It was with the publication of Changeling, however, that the brilliance of Wesolowski’s project really became apparent. It’s effective as a horror novel, with some incredibly creepy moments. It’s also a well-researched and sensitively told – and more than that, important – story about people and relationships. In an astoundingly clever piece of storytelling which delves into themes of manipulation and coercive control, the narrative itself mirrors the devious behaviour of the villain. When the truth is revealed, the reader – inevitably wrongfooted – is forced to confront their own understanding of the characters’ accounts. As if that wasn’t enough, Changeling also brings Scott King to the fore, integrating the series’ narrator into the plot ingeniously. I received an uncorrected proof copy of Demon in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Matt Wesolowski and Orenda Books. A girl frozen to death and three accused with 6 witnesses and a journalist with his own crime podcast were all in this book. 6 stories from the witnesses and I was capitulated into a different world so away from my reality.

Episodes

There is actually no way I can improve on what everyone else has been saying, Six Stories is a genuine marvel of a novel with its tense, atmospheric writing vibe and the ability to make you crazy. Inspired by the “Serial” set of podcasts this is bang on relevant in today’s wonderful world of technology but Matt Wesolowski manages to make it feel both modern and as old as time – a classic in the making, a touch of old school genius brought bang up to date. Six is constantly at risk of sliding into syrup: its feminist message is the lightest and most easily consumable one possible, some of the lyrics and lines are a little heavy handed, and the whole thing is so music-forward that the brief dialogue scenes threaten its collapse. But under international associate director Grace Taylor and Australian associate director Sharon Millerchip, the performers know when to lean into the charm and when to modulate into something softer. The story itself is a beautifully twisted tale, slowly slowly things are revealed, each “episode” bringing new information to light, not necessarily traditionally but through the reader slowly coming to know the players involved in this drama. The setting is stunningly drawn, often insanely creepy, the mythology and legend embedded into the plot makes it so much more than just a mystery – it kind of gets under your skin, whilst it is not sudden jump scary you find yourself switching the light on when you awake at 3am because you feel like something is hovering. Really beautifully done. There's occasionally some clumsy phrasing, but the plot's so gripping, the different perspectives so tantalising, that it barely matters. Like Serial and Making a Murderer, Six Stories is structured to manipulate your emotions, and once the story takes hold, you'll be dying to know how it ends (no pun intended). Some details ring true: the 'weird loner' vilified by the press; the teenagers' reluctance to admit to resentment, lust and bullying within their group; adults' hysteria about silly things like their tastes in music. Others are a little harder to swallow (all I will say here is: the mask thing).

Still, Six has a neat, eye-catching premise and a breezy confidence that seems to say, “Don’t worry about it too much, it’s fun!” every time the details stop making sense. The six ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII of England (divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived) are hosting a pop concert. But the concert also doubles as a contest, with each queen facing off to see who had the worst time as Henry’s wife. Given that there are two separate “beheadeds” in that group and only one “survived,” the competition is stiff. The Scott King podcasts are top tier level. Scott King delves into true crime cases that spark his interest, he’s influential and can connect with his interviewees on a personal level. Imagine an empty room – no furniture, blinds drawn, and walls covered floor to ceiling in newspaper clippings, internet printouts, victim and perpetrator photographs. An incident room. He’s immaculate. Ultimately it's a story you've seen elements of before - a dead body, people with secrets to keep, mysterious rumors, and a truth that's begging to come out. But throw in a clever format, some well plotted twists, and talented writing and it's a recipe for success.

Listen: On the one hand, Anne “ Politics Are My Thing” Boleyn did not blue ball a king for seven years, invent her own religion, and claw her way to the top of the English monarchy to be disrespected like that. On the other hand: The song’s a bop. Whatever, it’s fun! the podcast format in Six Stories is a big riff on (or : rip-off of) a real life one called Serial which I had not heard of but is I now realise a Big Thing. I may be barking up the wrong tree here but Serial sounded quite like the radio version of Making a Murderer (Netflix series) and The Staircase Murders before that. These shows investigate real life crimes & tease out all the complexities and interrogate witnesses and evidence. Six Stories is a creepy, atmospheric, suspense filled psychological thriller fueled by unreliable memories coupled with fear, myth, and darkness. What really did happen the night Jeffries disappeared, and why did it take a year for his body to surface? Was someone supposedly innocent actually guilty, or was there a supernatural force at play? Can our memories, our interpretations of events which occurred so long ago, particularly when we were young, be trusted, or is everything open to manipulation? Can the person who weaves the threads of the stories together be trusted either? When each take the spotlight and go solo, the audience just about loses their minds’: Chloé Zuel as Catherine of Aragon. Photograph: James D Morgan

While every book in this series contains suggestions of horror, I feel pretty sure Demon goes the hardest on that front (especially the climactic scenes of episode 3... shudder). At the same time, it also delves the deepest into the ethics of true crime – again, a thread that runs through the whole series, but never more prominent than it is here. Just as Changeling turned out to be about coercive control, or Deity about the corruptive nature of power, Demon explores the problem of what people do, think and say in response to a tragedy such as the Ussalthwaite murder.Tom was part of an informal adventure group called Rangers, comprising a handful of teenagers, some younger kids and their parents; Scott sets about interviewing the former Rangers, along with Haris Novak, an autistic man who was prime suspect at the time thanks to his familiarity with Scarclaw Fell, and Harry Saint Clement-Ramsay, who discovered Tom's body. It's through the interviews that an intriguing alternate narrative emerges. The interviewees recall tales of a 'marsh-hag' and the 'Beast of Belkeld', similar local legends about an evil presence lurking on the fell. Separately, several characters remember having glimpsed a spidery figure of unnatural height around the time of Tom's disappearance. Is the 'beast' a red herring, or an indication that this is more than just a murder mystery? King decides to take on the 1996 disappearance of 15-year-old Tom Jeffries, who went missing during a trip his Outward Bound-type group took to the Scarclaw Fell Woodlands Centre. Tom was one of five teenagers who participated in the trip, and none of his peers knew what happened to him—when they went to bed he was there, and when they awoke in the morning, he was gone. Tom's body wasn't discovered until a year later by the son of the man who bought the land where the Centre once stood. His death was ruled a "misadventure," and no one was found liable. This is a dark study in characterization like no other. Wesolowski almost forces you to walk around inside the heads of these people who hold onto their secrets like the sap adhering to those well-worn trees. But it is in the telling that Wesolowski reveals just enough with each podcast to have you perplexed.....perplexed with the inability to fit the puzzle pieces together.....and the fear that they just might. What happens next is somewhat disturbing to me. I’d like to think that when I die people will let me rest in peace. Unfortunately for the protagonist, a few of the doctors in charge of performing his autopsy aren’t so respectful to the dead. One doctor in particular, Rusty, who thinks Howard has an uncanny resemblance to Michael Bolton, finds it amusing to move Howards mouth in sync with his singing. Thankfully, Dr. Arlen doesn’t find this display very amusing and removes Rusty from the room. Interspersed with the six podcast episodes you also get to see the research that Scott has done on the case and snippets of Elizabeth and her YouTube channel too.