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The Guardians, by Andrew Pyper
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From acclaimed author Andrew Pyper, a gripping novel of psychological suspense about four men haunted by a secret from childhood.
There's no such thing as an empty house...
Trevor, Randy, Ben and Carl grew up together in the small town of Grimshaw as many boys do--playing hockey on the local team, the Guardians, and forging friendships that run deep. Twenty-four years later, Trevor, recently diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and faced with his own mortality, learns that his old friend Ben has committed suicide. He returns to Grimshaw to pay his respects and to reunite with Randy and Carl.
�
But going home means going back to the memories of a sinister crime that occurred in the abandoned house at 321 Caledonia Street--a crime that claws its way into the present, leaving its indelible mark on everyone. Chilling to the core and gripping in the extreme, The Guardians is taut psychological suspense that will leave you at once breathless and moved.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #1439400 in Books
- Published on: 2011-09-13
- Released on: 2011-09-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.01" h x .98" w x 4.99" l, .71 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Review
“The latest novel from Canadian author Pyper is an ambitious excursion into Stephen King territory. . . . With a well-executed narrative, both past . . . and present, strong characterization and some truly arresting images, The Guardians is a compelling and genuinely creepy read.”
— The Guardian (UK)
"Everything you could ask for in a thriller. It's psychologically unnerving, moves like a bullet, and is fraught with so much tension you might crack a tooth reading it. Outstanding in every way."
– Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River
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"Pyper reveals his skill with pacing as the story takes on the speed of midnight dash through a graveyard. And please note: This is not schlock horror dripping with gore. Pyper expertly creates terror through mood and setting. We hear what keeps going bump in the night, but never quite see it."
— The Globe and Mail
"A splendidly eerie haunted house story, and a superb evocation of small town life. The Guardians gripped me from its opening line and never let go."
– John Connolly, author of Every Dead Thing and The Lovers
“A perfect haunted-house story, a crisp, eerie October night of a book that had me in its clutches from page one."
– Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat�
“So much more than a thriller. Truly great writing, haunting, intelligent, human, terrifying. Pyper is a genius.”
– Deon Meyer, author of Thirteen Hours
"A master of psychological suspense at its spine-tingling best, Andrew Pyper knows just how to lure you in to all the deep, dark places of the human heart, and then, twist."
– Lisa Gardner, author of The Neighbor
“A dark, brooding, compelling story about the loss of innocence and the ubiquity of evil, with a final� as bittersweet as your fiftieth birthday party.”
— The Times (UK)
"Beautifully written...The characters are drawn with extraordinary skill."
— de Volkskrant (Netherlands)
"Pyper is the most striking Canadian crime writer to emerge in recent years and�The Guardians�is a characteristically intelligent move into Stephen King territory."
—�Mail on Sunday (UK)
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
ANDREW PYPER is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories, Kiss Me, which drew critical acclaim and heralded him as a writer to watch. His first novel, Lost Girls, was a national bestseller in Canada and a Notable Book selection in the New York Times Book Review and the London Evening Standard. The novel won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. His chilling follow-up novel set in the Amazon, The Trade Mission, was called "remarkable and compelling" by The London Times. His third novel, The Wildfire Season, was a national bestseller and acclaimed in Canada, the U.S. and Britain. His latest novel, The Killing Circle, a national bestseller and New York Times Notable book, was published in Fall 2008. The Guardians, as well as three of his previous novels, is being developed for feature film.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
[ I ]
�
�
The call comes in the middle of the night, as the worst sort do.
�
The phone so close I can read the numbers on its green-glowing face, see the swirled fingerprint I’d left on its message window. A simple matter of reaching and grabbing. Yet I lie still. It is my motor-facility impairment (as one of my fussily unhelpful physicians calls it) that pins me for eighteen rings before I manage to hook the receiver onto my chest.
�
“I don’t even know what time it is. But it’s late, isn’t it?”
�
A familiar voice, faintly slurred, helium-pitched between laughter and sobs. Randy Toller. A friend since high school—a time that even Randy, on the phone, calls “a million years ago.” And though it was only twenty-four years, his estimate feels more accurate.
�
As Randy apologizes for waking me, and blathers on about how strange he feels “doing this,” I am trying to think of an understanding but firm way of saying no when he finally gets around to asking for money. He has done it before, following the unfairly lost auditions, the furniture-stealing girlfriends, the vodka-smoothed rough patches of his past tough-luck decade. But in the end Randy surprises me when he takes a rattling, effortful breath and says, “Ben’s dead, Trev.”
�
Trev?
�
This is my first, not-quite-awake thought. Nobody’s called me that since high school, including Randy.
�
“How?”
�
“A rope,” Randy says.
�
“Rope?”
�
“Hanging. I mean, he hung himself. In his mom’s house.”
�
“He never went outside. Where else could he have done it?”
�
“I’m saying he did it in his room. Up in the attic where he’d sit by the window, you know, watching.”
�
“Did his mom find him?”
�
“It was a kid walking by on the street. Looked up to see if that weird McAuliffe guy was in the window as usual, and saw him swinging there.”
�
I’m quiet for a while after this. We both are. But there is our breath being traded back and forth down the line. Reminders that we aren’t alone in recalling the details of Ben’s room, a place we’d spent a quarter of our youth wasting our time in. Of how it would have looked with the grown-up Ben in it, attached to the oak beam that ran the length of the ceiling.
�
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Randy says finally.
�
“Take that back.”
�
“I didn’t—it’s just—”
�
“Take that stupid bullshit back.”
�
“Fine. Sorry.”
�
Randy has led the kind of life that has made him used to apologizing for saying the wrong thing, and the contrite tone he uses now is one I’ve heard after dozens of defaulted IOUs and nights spent sleeping on my sofa between stints in rented rooms. But then, in little more than a whisper, he says something else.
�
“You know it’s sort of true, Trev.”
�
He’s right. It is sort of true that with the news of Ben McAuliffe’s suicide there came, among a hundred other reactions, a shameful twinge of relief.
�
Ben was a friend of mine. Of ours. A best friend, though I hadn’t seen him in years, and spoke to him only slightly more often. It’s because he stayed behind, I suppose. In Grimshaw, our hometown, from which all of us but Ben had escaped the first chance we had. Or maybe it’s because he was sick. Mentally ill, as even he called himself, though sarcastically, as if his mind was the last thing wrong with him. This would be over the phone, on the rare occasions I called. (Each time I did his mother would answer, and when I told her it was me calling her voice would rise an octave in the false hope that a good chat with an old friend might lift the dark spell that had been cast on her son.) When we spoke, neither Ben nor I pretended we would ever see each other again. We might as well have been separated by an ocean, or an even greater barrier, as impossible to cross as the chasm between planets, as death. I had made a promise to never go back to Grimshaw, and Ben could never leave it. A pair of traps we had set for ourselves.
�
Despite this, we were still close. There was a love between us too. A sexless, stillborn love, yet just as fierce as the other kinds. The common but largely undocumented love between men who forged their friendship in late childhood.
�
But this wasn’t the thing that bridged the long absence that lay between our adult lives. What connected Ben and me was a secret. A whole inbred family of secrets. Some of them so wilfully forgotten they were unknown even to ourselves.
�
�
Only after I’ve hung up do I notice that, for the entire time I was on the phone with Randy, my hands were still. I didn’t even have to concentrate on it, play the increasingly unwinnable game of Mind Over Muscles.
�
Don’t move.
�
It’s like hypnosis. And like hypnosis, it usually doesn’t work.
�
Everything’s okay. Just stay where you are. Relax. Be still.
�
Now, in the orange dust of city light that sneaks through the blinds, I watch as the tremor returns to my limbs. Delicate flutterings at first. Nervous and quick as a sparrow dunking its head in a puddle. An index finger that abruptly stiffens, points with alarm at the chair in the corner—and then collapses, asleep. A thumb standing in a Fonzie salute before turtling back inside a fist.
�
You know what I need? A week in Bermuda.
�
These were the sort of thoughts I had when the twitches showed up.
�
I need to eat more whole grains.
�
I need a drink.
�
The hand-jerks and finger-flicks were just the normal flaws, the software glitches the body has to work through when first booting up after a certain age. I had just turned forty, after all. There was a price to be paid—a small, concealable impediment to be endured for all the fun I’d had up until now. But it was nothing to worry about. It wasn’t a real problem of the kind suffered by the wheelchaired souls you wish away from your line of sight in restaurants, your appetite spoiled.
�
But then, a few months ago, the acceptable irregularities of the body inched into something less acceptable. Something wrong.
�
I went to the doctor. Who sent me to another doctor. Who confirmed her diagnosis after a conversation with a third doctor. And then, once the doctors had that straightened out, all of them said there was next to nothing they could do, wished me well and buggered off.
�
What I have, after all, is one of those inoperable, medically unsexy conditions. It has all the worst qualities of the non-fatal disease: chronic, progressive, cruelly erosive of one’s “quality of life.” It can go fast or slow. What’s certain is that it will get worse. I could name it now but I’m not in the mood. I hate its falsely personal surnamed quality, the possessive aspect of the capital P. And I hate the way it doesn’t kill you. Until it does.
�
�
I spoke to a therapist about it. Once.
�
She was nice—seemed nice, though this may have been only performance, an obligation included in her lawyer-like hourly fee—and was ready to see me “all the way through what’s coming.” But I couldn’t go back. I just sat in her pleasant, fern-filled room and caught a whiff of the coconut exfoliant she’d used that morning to scrub at the liver spots on her arms and knew I would never return. She was the sort of woman in the sort of office giving off the sort of scent designed to provoke confessions. I could have trusted her. And trusting a stranger is against the rules.
�
(There was something else I didn’t like. I didn’t like how, when she asked if I had entertained any suicidal thoughts since the diagnosis and I, after a blubbery moment, admitted that I had, she offered nothing more than a businesslike smile and a tidy check mark in her notepad.)
�
One useful suggestion came out of our meeting, nevertheless. For the purposes of recording my thoughts so that they might be figured out later, she recommended I keep a diary chronicling the progress of my disease. Not that she used that word. Instead, she referred to the unstoppable damage being done to me as an “experience,” as if it were a trip to Paraguay or sex with twins. And it wasn’t a journal of sickness I was to keep, but a “Life Diary,” her affirmative nods meant to show that I wasn’t dying. Yet. That was there too. Remember, Trevor: You’re not quite dead yet.
�
“Your Life Diary is more than a document of events,” she explained. “It can, for some of my clients, turn out to be your best friend.”
�
But I already have best friends. And they don’t live in my present life so much as in the past. So that’s what I’ve ended up writing down. A recollection of the winter everything changed for us. A pocket-sized journal containing horrors that surprised even me as I returned to them. And then, after the pen refused to stand still in my hand, it has become a story I tell into a Dictaphone. My voice. Sounding weaker than it does in my own ears, someone else’s voice altogether.
�
I call it my “Memory Diary.”
�
�
Randy offered to call Carl, but we both knew I would do it. Informing a friend that someone they’ve known all their life has died was more naturally a Trevor kind of task. Randy would be the one to score dope for a bachelor party, or scratch his key along the side of a Porsche because he took it personally, and hard, that his own odds of ever owning one were fading fast. But I was definitely better suited to be the bearer of bad tidings.
�
I try Carl at the last number I have for him, but the cracked voice that answers tells me he hasn’t lived there for a while. When I ask to have Carl call if he stops by, there is a pause of what might be silent acceptance before the line goes dead. Randy has a couple of earlier numbers, and I try those too, though Carl’s former roommates don’t seem to know where he is now either (and refuse to give me their own names when I ask).
�
“Not much more we can do,” Randy says when I call him back. “The guy is gone, Trev.”
�
There it is again: Trev. A name not addressed to me in over twenty years, and then I get it twice within the last half-hour.
�
I had an idea, as soon as Randy told me Ben had died, that the past was about to spend an unwelcome visit in my present. Going from Trevor to Trev is something I don’t like, but a nostalgic name change is going to be the least of it. Because if I’m getting on a train for Grimshaw in the morning, it’s all coming back.
�
Heather.
�
The coach.
�
The boy.
�
The house.
�
The last of these most of all because it alone is waiting for us. Ready to see us stand on the presumed safety of weed-cracked sidewalk as we had as schoolchildren, daring each other to see who could look longest through its windows without blinking or running away.
�
For twenty-four years this had been Ben’s job. Now it would be ours.
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Creepy Canadian Chiller
By Amazon Customer
I don't read a lot of Canadian authors. Not because I have anything against them of course, it's just that I rarely seem to come across them on my bookish travels. The last book I read that was actually set in Canada, prior to this one, was probably Moonheart or another title by Charles DeLint. I mention this because the Canadian setting in this book is very noticeable due to the constant references to Ice Hockey. The Guardians of the title for example, are primarily, the hockey team for which the key characters played as young men. That Canadian identity is really the first thing that struck me about this book, and it contributes to a strong sense of place which I really liked.
The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of one character in two different time periods. One is naturally enough, the present, and the other is revealed in extracts from the same character's journal, providing an unreliable narrative of events that happened in 1984. In the present the main character, Trevor, has learned that one of his best friends from childhood has taken his own life. Trevor has been appointed as executor of the will, and must travel back to the small town of Grimshaw where he grew up, in order to attend the funeral and carry out his late friend's final wishes. Which means going back to confront a past he had long hoped was behind him. It's not just the emotional difficulty of confronting the past that Trevor must deal with either, in the present he has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, and is already suffering from diminished mobility and other effects of the condition.
As boys, Trevor and his friends Ben, Randy and Carl were involved in a shocking event that took place in an abandoned house long considered haunted. The events at the Thurman House left each of them scarred in their own way, and now Ben, the only one who stayed in Grimshaw, has committed suicide. When Trevor returns to Grimshaw himself, events occur which have an eerie parallel to those from the past.
This novel is definitely creepy and atmospheric, but more than that it is melancholic, and actually quite sad in places. It is a story about friendship and about the passage of life. It certainly resonated with me and in some ways with where I am at this time in my own life. Not the obvious areas of drama, but I am approaching a similar age to the main characters in the story, and this is as much a book about the onset of middle-age as anything else. It is a story about the events that shape a person's life, and what we do with them as we attempt to move forward.
I think it's fair to say that this is actually a fairly masculine book as well. I don't mean in a posturing, strutting, blood and adrenalin way. But in that it very much centres on the bonds that men and boys form with one another, and the way that men feel they need to be in the world. Again, a lot of this I really connected with, but I do wonder if female readers will connect as easily.
Originally, I expected this to be little more than an enjoyable haunted house story. In actuality there is much more to it than that. At its heart, The Guardians is a classic coming of age story with supernatural overtones, in the tradition of Stephen King's IT and The Body (which became the film, Stand by Me). It has all the ingredients of an atmospheric chiller, a suspenseful crime thriller, and an excellent focus point in the abandoned Thurman House. Above all, it is an emotive story about the passage of time, and the importance of overcoming the shadows of the past.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Awesome Ghost Story!
By Mel Odom
Andrew Pyper's novel The Guardians sucked me in on the first page and just wouldn't let me go until I'd finished it. There have been a lot of comparisons to Stephen King's It and "The Body," the short story from Different Seasons that became the movie Stand By Me. Those comparisons are dead on in so many way, but Pyper offers a different look at everything and displays a chilling creepiness that is mesmerizing.
The pacing in the novel makes the book hard to put down too. It's just way too easy to keep flipping pages. I finished it up in the dark, in the quiet of the house, just as it should be finished. This is definitely an atmospheric read and you should choose your surroundings wisely. Also, it would probably help to budget time to finish the book rather than just occasionally reading it.
The characters in the book are pretty well defined, but it's that sense of knowing all four of these guys that really got to me. Growing up at that age, I remember all the Carls, Bens, Randys, and Trevors that passed through the halls at my high school. Everybody had their own problems, their own struggles with fitting in, but you just didn't see the cracks because everybody was pretending that high school was easy.
When I saw that Pyper intended to present alternating chapters - one in the present and one in the past - I was somewhat disenchanted. I didn't see how the author could keep from breaking his narrative pacing. But he does. Every chapter Pyper has written blends perfectly with the last, and it's like watching the coals in a campfire die out one by one until there is only the cold, harsh fear of the unknown waiting up ahead.
This is a haunted house story, and even though it feels familiar, there are enough twists and turns along the way that it still feels new at the same time. But that's part of the pleasure of this book. The tale is like a half-remembered fever dream that drags you back down into the morass. You can recall some of what's going on, but only enough to let you know that what's coming is going to be pretty horrible.
Some of the best aspects of the book are all the mysteries Pyper has woven into the narrative. For a long time, the reader doesn't have all the pieces to the story to figure out everything that's going on, what happened to everyone in the story, and what's really at stake. Then it all comes together in a sudden, chilling blast at the end that will leave you wanting the story to be over and not wanting to let go until you get every last delicious tingle. You'll want to skip ahead, but don't cheat yourself of the experience.
I haven't read Andrew Pyper before, but he's definitely going on my to-be-read list. Thankfully there are four other books to catch up on, but if they all read like this one, I'll be caught up all too soon.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Chilling haunted house tale
By misplaced cajun
Ben, Trevor, Carl, and Randy have been friends for ages. They grew up together in the small town of Grimshaw, saw each other through their teens, played hockey together, and are permanently linked by what they saw and experienced in the old Thurman house. For them, the Thurman house was always a place to avoid. Empty and menacing, the house faced Ben's childhood home. Every once in a while, the kids saw something strange and inexplicable. But one day, something truly terrible happened and the four friends were the only witnesses. Ben never left Grimshaw. He watched the Thurman house tirelessly, serving as guardian and protector of the neighborhood, making sure that whatever lurked inside was never able to leave. But now Ben is dead and the Thurman house is awake again.
Pyper has just the right blend of suspense and atmosphere in this creepy ghost story. THE GUARDIANS is a page-turning hair-raiser for sure.
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