Book of the dayThrillers This article is more than 7 years oldReviewThe Poison Artist by Jonathan Moore review – the streets of San Francisco prove genuinely scary
This article is more than 7 years oldAn enigmatic woman comes between a toxicologist and a murderer in this hypnotic and disturbing thrillerIn Jonathan Moore’s chillingly disturbing The Poison Artist, the brilliant toxicologist Caleb Maddox is asked by his friend, San Francisco’s chief medical examiner Henry Newcomb, to examine a body that has been pulled from the bay. Henry is worried his own lab is missing something – there have been six other recent drownings – and wants Caleb to take a look.
Caleb welcomes the distraction. He’s just broken up with his girlfriend, Bridget – we meet him with a bruised, bleeding forehead after a fight. He knows he needs to get on with his work – he’s researching the physiological effects of pain, the chemical markers it leaves behind – but can’t focus. Looking into Henry’s request, he makes a horrifying discovery. Before the man died, “he went through as much pain as a man can take. Three hours, maybe more. Total, unbearable agony.”
Truths and realities slip in and out of focus somewhere between the long nights and the constantly filled glassesAnd then Caleb learns that the man was last seen at the bar where he was drinking himself, after fleeing the home he shared with Bridget. The bar where he met a woman who looks “as if she’d stepped out of a silent film, or crawled down from one of the alcoves where previously she’d been holding up a bronze olive branch, casting light and shadow”. He becomes obsessed with her, searching for her among the city’s speakeasies and all-night bars. Then he finds the mysterious Emmeline and falls headlong into her midnight, absinthe-soaked world, his real life of job, and Bridget, and the hunt for a serial killer, juxtaposing increasingly jarringly with his fixation.
“One dream still lingered, clinging to him like a film of night sweat: the long series of knocks on the door, and how he’d climbed from the bed and crossed the room, entranced with sleep but believing he was awake. He’d put his eye to the peephole. She was in the hallway, curved and distorted by the fisheye lens,” writes Moore, early on. “Not Bridget, but the woman in the black silk dress. He’d stepped back and watched the door handle move until the lock stopped it from going any further. It came up, then twisted down, harder this time.”
The Poison Artist takes place in a fog-bound, rain-drenched version of San Francisco, which becomes, in Moore’s telling, almost a city from a dream, where truths and realities slip in and out of focus somewhere between the long nights and the constantly filled glasses.
“At night, when the rain came in and the streetlights were an amber haze, and you were trudging alone down an empty trolley line because it was 3am and you were drunk – when you stopped to catch your breath at the top of a hill and caught sight of the bay and its black water reflecting the city like a sheet of shattered glass – in those moments, the city was a dreamscape. A dream she moved through as freely as the fog.”
It’s genuinely scarily, in the very best way, and nastily twisty, also in the very best way. Just like the clashes between Caleb’s day and night existences, Moore’s hypnotic, rich prose shifts and jars from seductive bars at night to the gruesome way fingerprints have to be taken from a body that has been underwater for days. Spiralling down from dream into nightmare, The Poison Artist is thoroughly unnerving and classily executed.
The Poison Artist is published by Orion (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £5.99
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