Giles Blunt is the author of the popular critically acclaimed 'Cardinal' series of books, this is his debut novel.
A somewhat disturbing grim quirky little somewhat supernatural story, but I enjoyed it for all that. A character driven story were all are very much either good or bad no one inbetween. Absorbing with some tension filled set piece moments and graphic violence.
Recommended
P.S. Can any of my fellow readers please explain why Giles Blunt books are so expensive? ( )

This creepy, dark tale was not your normal, everyday novel. The story revolves around Nicholas Hood, a mediocre, unhappy painter who is totally dissatisfied with his painting, his life, and himself.

Along comes a very odd little man, with an extremely ugly face and short stature, but with a definite interest in Nick's artwork. Eventually, the little man tells Nicholas that he can bring him success in his life. Nick wonders what the "catch" is. The little man says there is no catch. Nick decides to trust him and follow his directions......and from there, Nick's wildest dreams come true. But, of course, there is a price.... most definitely, there is eventually a heavy price to pay.

The author kept me involved in the story all the way to the last creepy page. Four Stars! ( )

I did not like this book at all. It reallly creeped me out. The weird little character who we find out later is the devil, is really a nasty little thing.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone...it's much too dark. ( )

I throughly enjoyed Blunt's, Forty Words for Sorrow, and thought it was about the best mystery/suspense book that I read last year (challenged only by Kerr's Berlin Noir triology), and so I was interested in reading this, Blunt's first book. It is out of print but I found many copies on the web used-book services and bought one from a small place near Toronto.

This book is not as accomplished as Forty Words for Sorrow in that the latter has a more complex interweaving of characters in a plot that really pulls you along. It is, however, quite intriguing as it is a clever mixture of Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nicholas Hood is a struggling and frustrated artist, married to a musician, Susan, who keeps bread on the table by giving concerts and teaching music. Hood's signature approach to art is that he always portrays murder, but he does not sell well, although his work is praised for its technical superiority. He is told one day that the problem with his painting is that he has obviously never really seen a death or a murder and his painting lack that extra touch of verisimilitude. And then into his life comes a misshapen, ugly dwarf of a man named Andre Bellisle who seems to understand completely all of Nick's inner thoughts and frustrations, and who demonstrates that he has the power to foresee events. He demonstrates this to Nick, and then uses his power to bring Nick to scenes of increasing horror and violence starting with suicides (a jumper and a man who immolates himself), moving onto murder (one scene that Nick witnesses through a video-tape, and then one that he witnesses in real-time). Nick's art takes on a new sense of realism (and Bellisle seems to have wealthy connections) and it starts to sell like hot-cakes at enormous prices. But it is clear that all of this happens at a very high price: Nick's increasingly coarse view of the value of life, his growing estrangement from his wife and his best artist-friend, and the drug-like effect of these episodes each of which calls for an escalation of violence and involvement for the next one. Nick tries, in the beginning, to resist, but he is always drawn back to Bellisle, and the commercial and critical success that he is now enjoying. And he notices that Bellisle is physically transforming with his skin clearing up remarkably and even growing in stature until he becomes a strikingly handsome man, just as Nick accelerates his moral slide to the ultimate experience of committing murder. A cautionary tale about obsession and the thin lines between being a witness and a participant, whether physically or morally, in evil acts. The jacket blurb describes Nick as a "controlled guignol"; I had to look that up: it means puppet.
(Feb/01)