#BookReview-‘The Forgotten Girl’ by Rio Youers

Thank you to Titan Books  for my gifted copy of ‘The Forgotten Girl’ by Rio Youers

About the book…

She possesses a unique and powerful ability. Just like we can erase data from a computer hard drive, Sally can erase memories from a person’s mind.

A dark mystery unfolds in Rio Youers’s riveting tale, for fans of Paul Tremblay and Joe Hill.

Abducted and brutally beaten by a group of thugs, street performer Harvey Anderson is convinced he’s a victim of mistaken identity when they demand to know the location of his girlfriend, Sally Starling.

Harvey Anderson has been single for years. She dominated my dreams. Sometimes as a lover, more often as a scared, lonely girl running from something that slathered and swooped. I woke with her name on my lips, clutching the empty half of the bed, knowing beyond all doubt that she should have been next to me. Aided by his thugs, a sinister man known as “the spider” has tracked Sally to Harvey. He has pursued her for nine years, desperate to possess her remarkable talents.

Yet emotion runs deeper than memory, and so Harvey goes looking for a woman he loves but can’t remember, and encounters a danger beyond anything he could ever imagine.

Harvey is going about his day to day job of, well, being Harvey, busking and keeping a low key, off the grid, hippy lifestyle. He doesn’t bother society at large, he exists on the fringe and keeps ,mind and body together with his low expectations of life, he is, essentially in a good place and happy with the way things are going.

Until it doesn’t.

Until he is kidnapped, beaten and tortured on the basis of a signed leasing contract which asserts that he and a girl named ‘Sally Starling’ cohabited for years.

And when violence doesn’t work, along comes The Spider…

Rio has created a genuinely chilling character here, The Spider probes into the corners of Harvey’s mind, all he has the impression of is dancing with a woman in his head, he cannot remember where or even see her face, so is it a memory or just a construction based on what is supposed to have happened?

This is the genius of the book, it completely wrong foots you and has guessing as to what or who Sally is. Is she entirely blameless for what happened to Harvey, after all she did wipe all his memories of her…but who do memories belong to? And are they even accuarate or is it a remberance of a perception rather than something concrete and tangible? And what would it mean to the world if you could tap into, or remove, or alter the perception that people have,en masse, about gun violence, right wing extremists, nuclear weapons…any issue of global concern?

Sally exists as a construct in her own novel, she becomes who Harvey and the reader want her to be, she is a weapon in the wrong hands so, as with Harvey, she leaves no trace behind her to protect those she loves from the evil forces which are in pursuit.

But it does miore than tell a simply thrilling and suspense driven supernatural tale, ‘The Forgotten Girl’ paradoxically ensures by her actions that she will never be forgotten at the same time as asking questions of the reader about the creation of stories, the nature of love and the existence of hope.

Harvey was a flawed character, he opts out of life and has that privilege to not want or expect more than what he puts it so that kind of passive/aggressive attitude normally irritates me but that is just where he starts.He becomes a more fully rounded character you begin to care about and invest in as the story progresses and you want more for him even if he doesn’t want more for himself.

It’s fast paced, and the story moves tremedously quickly and you are happy to be swept up in the prose, landing, as you do, dead centre in Harvey and Sally’s story.

‘The Forgotten Girl’ is a marvelous read, I bought the next novel Rio wrote, ‘Halcyon’ on the basis of how much I enjoyed it. The hype on books is always swallowed with a tablespoon of salt, but in this case, with Paul Tremblay and Joe Hill amongst others singing its praises, any horro fan in their right mind would do themselves a disservice leaving this on the shelf.

About the author…

Rio Youers is the British Fantasy Award–nominated author of End Times and Point Hollow. His short fiction has been published in many notable anthologies, and his novel, Westlake Soul, was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Sunburst Award.

Twitter @Rio_Youers

@TitanBooks