Pan The Final Hours of Muriel Hinchcliffe.

by Claire Parkin

Pan The Final Hours of Muriel Hinchcliffe ABISBOOK Pan.

320 pages, Paperback

Published January 16, 2025

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

A rather horrible novel analogue of the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane story, of two women so locked in a love-hate relationship of mutual abuse that they destroy themselves and damage everyone around them.

I'm not sure I enjoyed it per se but I was absolutely compelled to read to the end. It's got a kind of morbid fascination, like a well judged Am I The Asshole post on Reddit writ large. I think this is one for lovers of domestic horror and/or unreliable narrators: it does the atmosphere and the creeping-up-on-you monstrousness well.

[Lucy Armstrong · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoy a good 'unreliable narrator' story and Ruth is about as unreliable as they come. It was intriguing enough to make for a speedy read but in the end I didn't find Muriels motives fleshed out enough to make sense, I suppose that could be attributed to Ruth's inability to understand them but there was a lack of satisfaction in the end.

[Kate Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I enjoyed parts of this, overall I found it quite unsatisfactory. It’s the tale of a very toxic friendship, filled with a rather unbelievable amount of betrayal, jealousy and revenge. Ruth is an unreliable narrator, a device that is difficult to make work well. As the story develops and you learn more of the background events, your sympathies move away from Ruth towards Muriel, who becomes a more likeable and wronged person than she at first appears. The main problem is the lack of credibility in the really extreme method used by Muriel to get her revenge, it just didn’t really work as a convincing bit of plotting or character. The other issue for me was just the sheer amount of unpleasantness between the two friends and the lack of any redemption. The labelling of the book as ‘a delicious story of…..’ implies that the over the top aspects of it are there to amuse, but that didn’t work for me.