Lightning Review: Id

I thought I’d do another one of my Lightning Review things for a recent book I finished. Today’s subject is a book called Id by Paul Craig.

Picking up Id for only 77p on the Kindle store, I intended to read the book while on a couple of long train journeys last month. Naturally, travelling with a friend put paid to any serious bouts of reading on both occasions, but with Kindle in hand I made a good start, and got a third of the way in.

Id has an unusual style to its construction – each chapter works chronologically from the “end” of the story through to the “beginning”, which is a very intriguing way to do it, and I think it worked. It was sure interesting to find out why the harrowing events of the initial chapters happened, what led the protagonist, who is quite mysteriously described only as “the man”, and to have a sense of foreboding when working backwards, knowing what happens to these characters before it happens to them. I found myself hoping, waiting to see if things might magically end up differently, without so many bloodied corpses littering the floor, but knowing what was going to happen left a macabre sense of thrill when the focus of the current chapter ties gruesomely into the end of the prior one.

My only real complaints were that it requires a little bit of mental gymnastics to loop what is happening at the end of one chapter you just finished to the beginning of the previous chapter that you might have read a while ago. I didn’t need to flick back but you need to be sharp and alert not only to make sense of the book, but also to enjoy it to the full. I was also a little let down with the ending/beginning of the story not quite in my mind tallying up with the picture built up throughout the rest of the novel of “the man” being a serial killer, but there’s only one way to find out if I got it right, and it’s to do something that you can’t do with many books, which is: to read it backwards.

All in all, I was very pleased with Paul’s work here and it was definitely a steal at just 77p. Check it out!

My rating:

 

Get Id on Amazon here, and follow Paul Craig on Twitter here.