The Vogue

A wonderfully eerie, tragic read. I read it with my heart in my mouth.

Told in Eoin McNamee’s trademark terse and melancholy prose, as salt-pitted and bleach-boned as the landscape it describes, The Vogue is an eerie, intense, haunted and haunting tale, with an air of chilling loneliness that seems to seep from the pages and into the very room in which you read it.

'McNamee's startling prose perfectly reveals the ley lines of place, seamlessly links past and present and journeys deep into the human heart. The Vogue is a masterful demonstration of his sublime talent.'

McNamee writes crime novels quite unlike anyone else, and this haunting story of betrayal and abuse at an airbase during the Second World War lingers long after the final pages have been turned.

the real pleasure of this novel is in its noirish exposition of bleak townscapes and blighted lives. These are often evoked in explicitly cinematic terms (as when we observe Cole’s comings and goings through Upritchard’s surveillance cameras), but McNamee’s compositions are much more Lars Von Trier than Ridley Scott, the frame filled with off-season melancholy and flickering marram grass.
The interiors are no less dismal, but just as rich in well-observed detail. McNamee’s prose, too, is at its most satisfyingly flinty when he is setting out these sombre tableaux. . . invites comparison with such giants of the genre as James Ellroy.
Like Ellroy, McNamee conjures dark delights from dark places, places where there is “no prospect of anything other than more rain, more night”

Eerie, atmospheric and elliptical