Creeping Jenny

John Nyquist #3

by Jeff Noon

In the winter of 1959, private eye John Nyquist arrives in the village of Hoxley-on-the-Hale with only a package of cryptic photographs, and the frail hope of finding an answer to a question he’s been asking since his childhood.

But the villagers offer little help, as each day brings a twisted new rule in the name of a different Saint that they, and Nyquist, must follow. And there are whispers of the return of the Tolly Man, an avatar of chaos in a terrible mask…

As Nyquist struggles to distinguish friend from foe, and the Tolly Man draws nearer, he must race to finally settle the one mystery he has never been able to the disappearance of his father.

From the singular imagination of Jeff Noon comes this dark tale of folk horror in the Philip K. Dick Award-nominated John Nyquist series.

File Horror Fantasy [ Everyday Saints | Not the Ravens | Fatherland | Written in Blood ]

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction, Fiction, Noir, Thriller

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 14, 2020

About the author

Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy.

He studied fine art and drama at Manchester University and was subsequently appointed writer in residence at the city's Royal Exchange theatre. But Noon did not stay too long in the theatrical world, possibly because the realism associated with the theatre was not conducive to the fantastical worlds he was itching to invent. While working behind the counter at the local Waterstone's bookshop, a colleague suggested he write a novel. The result of that suggestion,

Vurt, was the hippest sci-fi novel to be published in Britain since the days of Michael Moorcock in the late sixties.

Like Moorcock, Noon is not preoccupied with technology per se, but incorporates technological developments into a world of magic and fantasy.

As a teenager, Noon was addicted to American comic heroes, and still turns to them for inspiration. He has said that music is more of an influence on his writing than novelists: he 'usually writes to music', and his record collection ranges from classical to drum'n'bass.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

With Creeping Jenny, Nyquist mystery #3, Jeff Noon has created a new fictional genre – the hypercreepy. Permit me to explain.

A Man of Shadows (Nyquist mystery #1) and The Body Library (Nyquist mystery #2) are both urban tales that will bring to mind Philip K Dick and China Miéville whereas Creeping Jenny is set in an English village and shares an uncanny affinity with the supernatural horror yarns penned by Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti. However, the happenings in Noon's novel are so eerie, weird and ominous, calling this tale creepy simply doesn't suffice – more to the point, we have entered the twisted, far-out freaky realm of the hypercreepy.

One interviewer asked Jeff Noon, "Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you'd written?" Jeff replied that he has always been jealous of Jorge Luis Borges because the Argentine author created stories about imaginary novels. After all, why write a long novel when you can simply write a short-story about a novel? Jeff's reply speaks to his fertile imagination - I'm sure Jeff could come up with dozens of stories about different fantastical novels. I mention this to underscore the power and uniqueness of Creeping Jenny - many scenes will surely etch themselves in your memory.

Jeff Noon frames the tale as follows: we're in the year 1959 and John Nyquist, private investigator by profession, receives seven photographs relating to his missing father from a mysterious sender, photographs beckoning him to a specific village. Is his father alive or dead? And what connects his father to this remote locale? Nyquist possesses deeply personal reasons for setting off to seek answers. Note: Creeping Jenny can be read as a standalone novel but reading A Man of Shadows and The Body Library prior will make for a richer experience.

I’m in complete agreement with Stephen King who has stated more than once that dust jackets and book reviewers frequently give away far too much, most especially when it comes to mysteries and thrillers. Not for me to be counted among those culprits, thus I’ll make an immediate shift to a few Creeping Jenny highlights:

HOXLEY-ON-THE-HALE
J.G. Ballard fumed:"The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters." Here we can think of novels by authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as well as all those popular TV shows set in quaint English villages featuring the likes of Inspector Morse, Father Brown or Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby.

Jeff Noon cites Ballard as a prime influence and Jeff shares J.G.'s hatred of the conventional novel. The tale's English village, Hoxley-on-the-Hale, is anything but quaint or charming; quite the opposite, every aspect of the village and its surroundings is disturbing, menacing and sinister in the extreme – in a word, hypercreepy.

Take the days dedicated to their local village saints – 360 days a year in total and each day demanding a different ritual. For instance, in observance of one saint, no speaking is permitted for the entire day - sophisticated arm and hand gestures only, a type of village-created sign language. On another day, all villagers wear a semitransparent mask that fuses with one's face, females wear the Alice mask and males wear the Edmund mask. And all villagers take on the names of Alice and Edmund. On still other days...well, again, Creeping Jenny is a tale of supernatural horror.

An additional village quirk: a saint is not assigned a specific day on the calendar. Every year saints and days are scrambled so villagers don't know what the next day will bring until informed by village elders. Sound weird? It is very weird. And are these villagers Christian? Maybe. There's a church at the end of the main road and a villager speaks the name of Jesus once but the more information we're given regarding these saints, odds are they're pagan. Want a good laugh? Imagine Jane Marple or Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby hunting down clues in Hoxley-on-the-Hale.

TOLLY MAN
Walking by the village green on his first evening in Hoxley-on-the-Hale, hearing a song being sung, Nyquist peers into the gloom -

“The dancers circled around each other, and around the pole. Their song continued, its words audible now, or nearly so, floating in the dark air.

Sing along a Sally, O
The moon is in the valley, O

He couldn't help but be drawn forth by the sight and the sound, close enough to feel the shadow children as they passed by, close enough almost to be a dancer himself, caught in a game. And even this close he was still unsure: were the children real, or imagined? The music, the slap of the ribbons and the shrieks of joy or terror, the motion of the wind writing its own story across the surface of the pond, he saw it all, and saw nothing, and reached out, steady now, steady, and he brushed against one child, a young boy, and felt hardly anything from the contact other than a breath. Their song had more substance than their bodies.

Come to grief or come what may,
Tolly Man, Tolly Man, come out to play!

And then they were gone, in an instant.”

I include this extended snippet to provide an example of how Jeff Noon creates an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling tone that grows deeper and darker as we turn the pages. And, of course, with the mention of a Tolly Man we hear echoes of The Wicker Man - 1973 British horror film starring Edward Woodward. In point of fact, we can easily picture thirtyish John Nyquist looking a bit like the famous actor.



NEVERMORE
Oh, I could list many more highlights, among their number: a swan with two heads, an ominous pool of water, a mysterious dark tower and even Creeping Jenny herself. But, alas, I'm writing a book review not a book so I'll conclude with a vivid detail (thus giving Jeff Noon the last words) and the wish you will treat yourself to this hypercreepy tale that, in the end, contains great beauty.

“The noise came again. Nyquist turned. He walked over to the birdcage on its stand. It was covered in a purple cloth. He lifted this off and peered through the bars. The brightly colored budgerigar was no longer in residence. Instead a raven was standing on the perch, its body and wingspan far too large for the cage. Like a creature from a nightmare it beaded him with one yellow eye, its head turned to the side. A single diamond of white marked its forehead, like the symbol of a castle, or an assassin's guild.”




British author Jeff Noon, Born 1957

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The severed tendril writhed around on the kitchen table. He picked it up with a pair of tongs and held it over the gas flame until it shriveled away into a blackened shred. The smoke stank to high heaven and made him want to gag, but he kept on until every last particle had burned away.” You do not want to encounter Creeping Jenny.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the author of the John Nyquist series partakes of hallucinatory drugs. Of course, it’s also possible that he just has a naturally enhanced imagination. Whatever the case, he has written an extremely entertaining, though perplexing, series that is sci-fi, horror, urban fantasy and detective noir. Nyquist is a detective in 1950s England, but it’s not like any England any of us has experienced. The first book, “A Man of Shadows”, was set in a city comprised of three parts: Dayzone (always light), Nocturna (always dark) and Dusk (best avoided). The second, “The Body Library”, was set in Storyville, that’s all about, words, language, literature that can literally cover your body. In “Creeping Jenny”, Nyquist goes to Hoxley-on-the-Hale to search for his father who disappeared in Dusk over 20 years ago. Each book can be read a a standalone.

Someone has been sending Nyquist clues about his father but it’s extremely difficult to determine who that person might be in a town that is controlled by 360 saints, each with its own rules. Some days, no one may speak, other days everyone is shrouded in their own little patch of fog, sometimes everyone has to wear the mask of one of the saints. The saint days are selected randomly so one never knows what the next day will bring. The entire book had a feeling of menace in which Nyquist was trapped in a disorienting, dreamlike situation. I always felt like something horrific was about to happen. There were a few pages at the end of book, comprised of a single sentence, where I was actually holding my breath.

These books are odd and confusing and certainly not for everyone, but I love them and I hope that the series continues.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, along with the two other standalone John Nyquist books, make up some of the most unflinchingly creative and original fiction I've ever read.

I say this without guile. If you want originality, uncompromisingly strange storytelling, and mysteries that only "feel" like traditional gumshoe Noirs until they get you firmly in its grip and twist you into psychedelic pieces, then do not pass this up.

I want to warn readers that they will get more than they bargain if they pick up one of these books, but a warning isn't fair. In fact, I think everyone should be forced to read them and discover these mysteries for themselves. It's like being welcomed into a Micky Spillane novel only to be Vandermeered or China Mievilled.

The first book was deeply disturbing with a city that was split up between an only day-side and an only night-side with a very dangerous dusk side. The second book, in a different, equally strange city, characters from books had real lives and libraries were becoming morgues with murdered people in books.

In this one, Nyquist becomes deeply enmeshed in a third, much smaller bucolic town where he tries to discover where his 20-year-missing-father had gone. Each day is like a brand new mystery, where seemingly mild small-town customs heralded by a different saint for every day, and everyone living there is compelled -- sometimes mercilessly -- to perform that story's function. Taboos, rituals, oddities... the culture here is a crazy character all on its own, and Nyquist investigates his own mystery alongside some very strange murders.

My description cannot do it justice. Nor would I want to give anything away. But this book honestly freaked me out. I could not see where it was going or where I was going to be taken. But between 1000-year-old mysteries, a dark green-man myth, stories of devils, tons of local saints (very strange ones), and one of the twistiest plots I've ever read, I can honestly say that I glowed with amazement.

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbly thrilling mystery, richly veined with weirdness, sly humour and dollops of folk horror.

I've been reading a lot J.G. Ballard the last year or so, and I've found out a weird truth about myself - I find a lot of comfort in the unsettling weirdness of Ballard's fiction. Reading his work feels like a warm bath, albeit one with a strange smell and wait did I just see something move in the water. I get the same feeling of unsettled comfort from reading this book.

First things first - this is the third book in the John Nyquist series, and the first of the series I have read. I have read quite a few of Jeff Noon's 'first wave' of fiction in the 90s, so I had an inkling what I could expect. I wasn't disappointed.

John Nyquist is a private detective in a world that looks and feels a lot like ours, but in importants aspects is very different. It's 1959 when Nyquist is sent a set of mysterious photographs, that seem connected to his estranged father George Nyquist, who disappeared twenty years ago. The photographs seem to suggest Nyquist Sr. might still be alive, and John travels to the small town of Hoxley-on-the-Hale to start his search.

Hoxley is under the influence of 360 Saints - each day is randomly assigned a Saint, who then exerts a specific effect on the populace. One day everyone must wear masks and address women and men as Alice and Edward respectively. Another day everyone can only do and say things by half, quite literally. Not only is it deeply frowned upon to not follow these rules, in a lot of cases it is almost physically and mentally impossible not to. (There are five Saintless days per year, when nothing happens, and the villagers generally feel lost.)

It's probably not surprising to hear that the good people of Hoxley are quite an enigmatic bunch, some helpful to Nyquist, most are harder to convince.

It's a roiling mix of typically English folk horror and a taut psychological thriller. It's the villagers of Royston Vasey visiting Summerisle (although Nyquist is no whimpering Sgt Howie). There is a real comparison to Ballard: as a lot of Ballard's worlds, Nyquist's world is one full of strangeness that's easier to accept and let roll over you than to fight. It's a book where I felt compelled to keep reading, all the time knowing surely no good can come of this.

The writing itself is delicious. Words have power, both in the book's world and in the text itself. Noon's writing is exact and lyrical, sometimes slipping into poetry (and I don't mean the quoted creepy children's songs), but never losing its sense of forward momentum. Characters start out as villager stereotypes, but quickly become living, breathing people.

Frightening and compelling. Please read it, if the Saints allow it.

(Kindly received an ARC from Angry Robot through Netgalley)

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.2 ⭐
Another creepy noir fantasy/mystery from Jeff Noon, his best in the series so far in my opinion.

John Nyquist is one of those detective characters whose later path in life was marked out by childhood tragedy, like Arkady Renko; Harry Bosch or even Bruce Wayne. Nyquist's mother was killed in an accident when he was seven. A year later he's abandoned by his father who disappears into the mysterious Dusk district of his home city, never to be heard from again.

Years later Nyquist, a well established private eye ( or enquiry agent, as the Brits used to say), receives an envelope containing seven photographs. Six are places in a country village he's never been to or heard of, Hoxley- on-Hale. The seventh is of a man who appears to be Nyquist's father.

All of the previous stories took place in dark, urban settings. This one is country creepy and it's no less unsettling; no "cozy" here. I haven't read enough Agatha Christie to know if this is homage to her murderous English villages but judging by the TV adaptations I've seen, it might be. There is a definite "Wicker Man" vibe going on: Celtic-ish horror and elder god types masquerading as Christian saints.

Noon is a master of creating brooding, eerie atmosphere and he's in top form here. The book is well plotted, the characters well drawn and it's a pretty good mystery story, as well. I've been racing through the Nyquist books but Noon's written plenty of other weird stuff I'll have to give a try.
-30-

[Chris Berko · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good it should be illegal.
Creeping Jenny is every bit as original and surreal and entertaining as the first two books in the series and Jeff Noon is really displaying his talents as a storyteller. Again he creates these mindboggling mysteries set in these madly genius settings populated by quirky and unforgettable people and it was easy to go eighty or a hundred pages at a time because of how engrossing it all is. To me, this is what reading is all about. Pure escapism with my feet FIRMLY planted in the author's world. I can't say enough about how much I enjoy reading his stuff and his books are fantastic for my stress level because I watch less news and go on twitter less while reading them.

These books can be read on their own and enjoyed I'm sure but there has been an underlying thread/mystery with the main character's father and that sort of comes front and center in this book and I'm glad I read them in the order I did.

If you're in a reading slump or even a dry spell, check out some Jeff Noon for that primo literary fix.

[Liz Barnsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Nyquist mysteries are a favourite of mine, the writing is superb and the quirky, creepy world that Jeff Noon has built here and where our protagonist resides is one of the most imaginative out there.

Once more with Creeping Jenny the surreal nature of the narrative immediately captured my brain - Nyquist is on the hunt for his Father in a village populated by saints. The story unfolds in dream like fashion and is intensely involving throughout.

I always have weird dreams after reading a Noon novel..this was no exception and is the reason I love them. Affecting and intelligent.

Whole series comes highly recommended from me.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some series demand that they be read in order, lest the reader be totally lost.

I suspect, though, that even those who have already read the first two books (A Man of Shadows and The Body Library) in Jeff Noon's series about investigator John Nyquist would be lost upon opening Creeping Jenny.

I almost gave up on it myself, in fact, but Creeping Jenny kinda... crept up on me.

I have journeyed north and walked through woodland and met with a strange woman and been given a new name, and nothing is happening. I am no clearer, no closer. I am lost in the woods and the pathway is dark and overgrown and twisted, and my name has been stolen, there is no light ahead...
—p.32

There is a mystery. There have been deaths, in the village of Hoxley-on-the-Hale where Nyquist finds himself, in which Nyquist hopes to find his father. There is indeed something for Nyquist, the investigator, to investigate. But... Creeping Jenny never does coddle Nyquist—nor the reader.

He didn't see the visitor, but he dreamt about her. But he didn't really dream about her, for the visit actually happened. But it didn't exactly happen, as such, it was more like a haunting. Or rather, something conjured from the sleeper's mind, his darkened mind, a figment of the imagination. Or not so much imagined, more remembered from his past, his childhood, or from a long-ago story. Not so much a story, and not so much a memory, but more an event that took place in another land, or planet. But not some distant planet, more the planet of the room and the village and the sleeper's place within it. And so, in this way, the visitation both happened, and didn't happen, simultaneously. Or perhaps the visit existed somewhere between the two states, happening, not happening, over and over—happening, not happening, happening, not happening, and on and on and on until the sleeper awoke.
Or didn't awake.
—pp.182-183

Got it now?

I hope so, because otherwise,

"It's too late now. We have gone too far, and cannot step back into the lighted path."
—Irene Higgs, p.275

*

Creeping Jenny marks a milestone for me—this is the first book in, oh, eighteen months or so that I was able to just walk into a library, see on a shelf, and check out. And it turned out to be a pretty good choice—however weird and unsettling Nyquist's world may be, Jeff Noon's novel also marks a return to something like normality, at least for me.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars. Same world as books 1 and 2 but a much different feel and story. Definitely more in the realm of speculative fiction and all the better for it. I don’t want to give away any plot. Just enjoy the strangeness

[Tamara Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know that feeling where you’re deep in dreams. Perhaps, in your mind’s eye, you’re running through a forest chased by a cat with a frog’s head. Your feet are moving, one in front of the other, but no matter how quickly you wheel your legs it feels like you’re moving through partially melted marshmallow and you can hear the frog wheezing behind you and smell the fusty stink of wet fur and—WAKE UP WAKE UP.

And it’s ok, you wrench your eyes open and look at the clock and you must only have been asleep for a matter of an hour or so. But there’s two blinking points of light in the corner of the room, and as your eyes adjust to the darkness a shadow pools around the lights, the shape solidifies and the head of a frog with a cat’s body stares out at you. A dripping tongue lashes out and the creature starts lisping, forming crude words with its slit of a mouth, and it says—WAKE UP GODDAMN YOU, WAKE UP NOW.

*And breathe*

Imagine this on constant repeat. Every day you wake up and the rules have changed, but you don’t know what they are and if you don’t find out then you might just lose yourself, or lose your soul, or at least lose some small change and a cereal box toy you didn’t realise you had in your pockets.

And this is the feeling that Noon manages to create in Creeping Jenny. He paints images so vividly it’s as if you’re walking through a picture book, the colour slipping off the pages and coating your brain. Each day feels like a tale you’d tell around a campfire, huddled over the flames, avoiding the branches and vines that seem to be leaning closer because *whispers* Creeping Jenny might be coming for you.

Noon creates yet another surreal and bizarre setting for Ncquist to navigate, with characters twisting and turning and plotting, gifting clues with one hand and hiding them with the other. In Hoxley, every new Saint brings its own rules and quirks, leaving Ncquist in a changing landscape. A landscape where he needs to hold onto enough of what’s real to unpick the mystery of his father’s disappearance. Noon’s writing draws you in, and you feel yourself walking with Nyquist, struggling against the different laws of the days, fighting against the limitations, surrendering to the customs and rituals because that might just be the only way to survive.

And this is where Noon weaves his magic, creating places so truly bizarre that you have no choice but to surrender to them, to hold on for the ride. Because when you wake up tomorrow you might not know what the rules are. But you never give up.

So dive into Creeping Jenny with an open mind and a taste for adventure, just be careful about drinking the tea. Because as to be expected with any Noon novel, nothing is quite as it seems.

Favourite line: “emotion was a curse on her face, something to be struggled with”

Read if: You want a beautiful, surreal journey into Saint’s tales, folklore and nightmares, woven through with strands of mystery.

Read with: A strong cup of tea around a campfire. Check the tea for tendrils before drinking.

ARC gratefully received from Angry Robot Books

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so very excited to find a new book from Jeff Noon on Netgalley. So far his Nyquist series absolutely wowed me with his imagination and creativity. I mean, I don’t even like series. Although to be fair, these books are different enough that they can probably be read as standalones. They are mysteries of the New Weird, a fascinating blend of genres, which is to say yes, there are puzzles to solve and webs to untangle, but it is to be done in a world that plays by a very different set of rules. In fact, Noon created a radically different world for each book. And that is by far my favorite thing about Nyquist books. Even this one, which for some reason didn’t quite work for me as much as its predecessors. Mind you, that’s a very high bar to hit, meaning this was still a very good read, it’s more likely I just wasn’t exactly in the right mood for the singular weirdness of it all. So essentially it is the mystery aspect of the book that didn’t quite wow me, the world building was absolutely on par with the astounding levels of awesomeness from two previous books. This time Nyquist enters a world ruled by saints. 360 saints for 360 days, each with their own set of rules to abide, and five free days when the locals simply don’t know what to do with themselves. Such a wild and fun concept. Albeit challenging for Nyquist, who has come there to look for his father long presumed gone. Writing this review a week after reading the book, somehow the details are some already kind of fuzzy, but the main premise remains and it’s a delight. It purely delights you as a reader looking for a literary creation that is both different and original. That’s my main takeaway from reading this book and reading Noon in general. The plot details may or may not work for you to the same extent, but the world building is second to none. Absolutely superb feat of imagination. Plus great writing, as always. The Nyquists quests are dark and moody and undeniably weird and I’d imagine require a specific audience or at least an audience in a specific mood, but they are absolutely worth reading, if only to journey places unlike any others on maps you know. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of great ideas in a folk horror setting. The prose is pretty conventional, considering some of Noon's other work. The magic is messy and hard to pin down, just how I like it. The overall treatment can be tighter (a couple of the saints didn't lend themselves to very eventful days), but this was pretty entertaining.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 4.5 of 5

Kafka in Wonderland. That's what I kept imagining as I read through this fantastic book.

Detective John Nyquist is getting clues about his father who disappeared over 20 years ago. He goes to visit the quaint but odd little village of Hoxley-on-Hale. Here the villagers honor 360 different saints, 360 days a year. For five days the villagers arefree to celebrate how they choose. These celebrations are extreme and the villagers follow them, er, religiously. On one day they may all wear masks, on another day they don't speak, and still another they complete only half of EVERYthing (speech, actions, etc), and another still where everyone is addressed as either Alice or Edward. For a visitor looking for information, as Nyquist is, this is all very confusing and confounding. One might think that on one of those five 'free' days, it might be easier to commune with the villagers, but the citizens generally feel lost and uncertain on those days.

Nyquist has a very challenging time just trying to uncover who has been sending him messages about his father and what might have happened to his father and it only gets more complicated as there are some unusual murders occurring and he is clearly the most capable of detectives to look into this.

Really, all I can say to this is: Wow.

Jeff Noon is so incredibly creative. He writes some of the most amazing speculative fiction I have ever read. The story here is truly awesome, but it's the journey, it's Jeff Noon's writing that transforms this from a simple good book to an experience.

It's not just the wildly unusual/creative world surrounding Nyquist that is so wonderful here, it's following Nyquist, seeing this world through his eyes, and trying to make some sense of what is happening. This series really is like Alice wandering through Wonderland. We have the one person with whom we identify - someone more-or-less like us, thrown into extremely unsettling situations and trying to navigate through it, with a goal in mind.

Looking for a good book? Creeping Jenny by Jeff Noon is the third book in the John Nyquist series and is astoundingly good. If you are extremely adverse to feeling disoriented, you might want to avoid this book. But if you enjoy wading through a Wonderland, or the varied realities in a Philip K. Dick novel, then settle yourself in and open this book.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

[Stuart Dredge · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read ‘A Man of Shadows’, the first of Jeff Noon’s Jon Nyquist novels, about three years ago. It was a bit of a struggle: I didn’t like him much as a character; was unsure about the shift from detective-noir to queasily-magical surrealism; and the different time-streams / cycles were confusing. But something about Nyquist and his world nagged at me ever since.

I’m glad it did, because that’s what led me to ‘Creeping Jenny’, which I enjoyed much more. That’s partly because Nyquist has been taken out of his original Dayzone/Dusk/Nocturna environment, so the time-bending stuff is gone. Instead he’s in a village, Hoxley, with its own not-of-this-world ruleset that’s easier to grasp.

Every day (well, almost every day) is governed by a different local saint, with their own restriction or effect on the population. One saint’s day bars everyone from speaking; another sees the entire village fall asleep; another sees them wearing creepy flesh-merging masks turning them into ‘Alice’ or ‘Edmund’; and so on. Nyquist has to work within this framework to unravel a puzzle that might lead him to his long-lost father.

The strangeness is still there in spades. I suspect there’ll be lots of comparisons to psychedelic drugs experiences, especially the (few, not many) parts where the prose shifts into what’s almost a babbling mania. I don’t know about drugs: to me it often felt more like a feverish dream (or nightmare!) – and a couple of nights after reading it at bedtime, I had fairly weird dreams of my own. This as a compliment…

Hoxley is also properly, deliciously Wicker-Man creepy with its Tolly Man ritual and local legends, the villagers’ distrust of outsiders, and the nature of ‘Creeping Jenny’ herself, as Nyquist uncovers it. Meanwhile, I warmed to him much more as a character: his confusion, his tiredness, his yearning for information about his father – rounding him out beyond the boozing and beatings of the first book.

It’s much more than just the ‘hard-boiled detective out of his element’ noir it may seem at first glance. ‘Creeping Jenny’ is eerily, feverishly *weird* – but this time round, that’s its strength. I’d recommend it, and I am already looking forward to seeing what awaits John Nyquist next time out.

The publisher provided me with an ARC (advanced reading copy) via NetGalley, in return for an honest review.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn’t aware this was part of a series until I went to review it (I wish there had been some indication of that in the preliminary pages). The story was still engaging and interesting, but I felt like I was missing some integral details of Nyquist’s character (including what he looked like) and the fact that this story takes place in some sort of alternate reality version of 1960s England. If this story was intended to stand completely on its own, a little more exposition into Nyquist’s life in “Dayzone”, wherever that is, would have been helpful.

Yet, the story itself is self-contained enough that I was still very much engaged with the mystery. The setting itself is wonderful – a rural town with shifty residents and an increasingly supernatural series of rituals they partake in every day. The people Nyquist meets are either perfectly quirky or subtly sinister and it’s evident the town functions as a normal one would, despite the strange rituals it undergoes daily.

You do have to suspend your disbelief about these rituals, given how intense some of them are. But it’s possible this sort of supernatural going-on is common in Nyquist’s universe but I wasn’t aware of it, having not read the other two novels. I’m assuming this is the case, as Nyquist doesn’t seem overly perturbed that these rituals exist, which would have probably freaked out people in real life.

Unlike some detective stories, where the PI is motivated by money or some vague sense of duty, I liked that this novel has a personal focus to it, which lent Nyquist’s actions more logic – when he commits b and e’s and other risky manoeuvres it’s because he’s desperate to learn about his father. That being said, Nyquist is a rather flat character: while he fits the typical noir detective archetype, he is boring. He is either stoically plodding towards his goal, tired, or demanding answers from people (who seemed quite willing to comply for the most part). There are hints of sympathy about him and he clearly is a “good man”, but the mystery of the town compelled me far more than caring about him.

The absolute best part of this novel is the atmosphere. Noon manages to include well-known tropes of the genre (the witch in the woods, etc) but they don’t come off as cliché. It doesn’t quite reach horror levels, but the creepy ambience pervades throughout the story in a way that makes it the star of the show.

Overall, while I wish I’d known of the previous two novels before this one, it was an enjoyable, creepy mystery that kept me wondering.

[Scott Hitchcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book 1: 5*
Book 2: 5*
Book 3: 4*

While not as good as the first two this is still another solid effort. I still loved how different this world is and his story telling style as well. The plot just didn't have that wow factor at the end.

[Nick Burgoyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5* I'm not entirely sure what I've just read. It felt as if the author wrote Creeping Jenny in one session, in a stream of consciousness trip through a long harrowing night, where his hallucinogenic dreams manifested on the page. There is next to no logic and the characters are barely there. But what we get is a tantalising dreamscape with an atmosphere so potent it is sure to creep about my mind for a long time. The novelty does wear off towards the end, and its many plot flaws more pronounced, but I was incredibly entertained by Creeping Jenny and its surreal world.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this story a lot. A trippy and very original noir mystery with supernatural elements. I cannot recall reading a story like this. Great writing – concise, straightforward and powerful. This guy writes. I felt like I was watching a black and white movie with lots of gray. I have two other Nyquist mysteries that I would buy right now if I didn’t already have them.

[RG · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series is pure perfection. The langauge, the plotting, the weirdness. Please go buy this book or start at the beginning. Noon needs more praise!!

[Zachary Houle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always wondered what had happened to Jeff Noon. Back in the ’90s, this UK writer was one of my favourites, turning out one of the best books ever written about virtual reality, Vurt, and a crackling sequel to Alice in Wonderland called Automated Alice. Then, he seemingly disappeared. His books started getting removed from the shelves of the local library. It was as though he had vanished into thin air. Well, it turns out that Noon is back, and this time he’s writing sci-fi mysteries as part of a series that centres around private eye protagonist John Nyquist. His third book in the series is the recently published Creeping Jenny. The great thing about this book is that you can dive right in — no need to read the preceding two novels. It’s a genuinely thrilling book that answers the question, “How would The Wicker Man have turned out if it had been written by Franz Kafka?”

Set in the winter of 1959 in an alternate reality of the UK, Creeping Jenny takes place in a small town on the moors called Hoxley-on-the-Hale. John Nyquist has been pulled to this burg thanks to a package of mysterious pictures that have been mailed to him, suggesting that his long-lost father is now residing in the village. The thing is, once he arrives, he discovered that a Saint rules each day in the village, giving the day a strange sort of nightmarish power — one Saint’s Day prevents people from speaking, while another forces villagers to spend the entire day in bed. It’s against this strange backdrop of religious ritual — one that includes a town resident dressing up as resident boogeyman the Tolly Man, a kind of collection of twigs and branches strung together into human form — that Nyquist must solve the mystery of what’s happened to his dad.

Read the rest of the review here: https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-r...

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The imagination within this entire series is beyond amazing and I have thoroughly enjoyed every book. Creeping Jenny gives us another Nyquist story to enjoy and the mystery doesn’t disappoint. The mind of Jeff Noon is to be cherished. Where as A Man of Shadows was the introduction and blew me away followed by The Body Library which was a lesson in the art of style, Creeping Jenny might have been the easily digestible and quickest read imo out of all of them. Not sure if that’s just because after the first two I’m aware what I’m getting myself into and even still I couldn’t predict any imagery that was used. Truly in awe I love following Nyquist around as he gets into the most amazing situations. I’m not the quickest reader by far but I finished this book in less than 48 hours which is saying a lot. I’m also in a shelter in place state in the United States currently due to covid 19 but still it didn’t go unnoticed. The only problem with finishing a book so quickly is its over now and I have to wait until another Nyquist mystery is unleashed on us. Fingers crossed for sure. I have yet to read any of Jeff Noon’s earlier titles so I look forward to checking out Vurt soon.

[Kate Sherrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like Jeff Noon a lot already, but these Nyquist novels are simply blowing me away. At bottom they're just good old noir detective whodunnits with speculative fiction twists, but the twists are some of the most inventive and unusual I've seen, for all that at bottom they also boil down to just more iterations of Noon's Lewis Carroll fixations. And I do mean that in the plural: not just Carrollian word play, or Carrollian whimsy, surrealism, mathematico-logical offerings (I evoke Hofstadter as deliberately as these books' cover artist has) and supporting character hostility. An important through line to the story of John Nyquist's journeys through Wonderlandish communities seems to have wrapped up in this book where I would expect it to in the fourth and (I believe) final one, but Noon still has plenty up his sleeve, I trust -- and it looks like the son of perpetual daylight, who had to tangle with a whole city full of twisted authorial intent last novel and contend with 360 bizarre Saint's Days (each with its own inconvenient, creepy and sometimes downright hazardous paranormal behavioral compulsions) has now gotten himself a sidekick? Bring it on!

[Emma Leadley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favourite of the Nyquist series. It is full of Noon's trademark weirdness but somehow more controlled than other books in this series. It still contains beautiful, poetic paragraphs that you have to read over and over to fully appreciate the rhymes and the half rhymes and the imagery the words evoke -- something I first read in Vurt -- and the stream of consciousness is an absolute delight to become immersed in. So why not five stars? I felt there were too many characters and occasionally, I'd have to stop reading to remember who a particular character was before continuing. Otherwise it would be full marks from me.

[Annarella · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first book I read in this series but I liked it so much that I bought all the previous instalments.
It's weird, atmospheric, enthralling and I couldn't put it down.
It was not love at first read but the more I read the more I was fascinated by the characters and the world building.
I think that Mr Noon can surely write a story that will keep you hooked till the last page.
An excellent read, highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detective like I've never read before arrives in a village with a packet of photos .. looking, we discover , for his dad .. the villagers are strangely reticent and become more so . The characters and story get more delightfully perverse but we are wholly involved with Nyquist's search in this really well written, unique volume .. I loved it, and when I discover there are another two , I was totally pleased .. I'm getting them. Really an eye opener in the ways of devious engrossing fiction. Things don't go right but make perfect sense!

[Richard B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have really enjoyed the Nyquist series, but this is my favorite of the three so far. Set outside of the cities of the first two, in a bizarre English village has Nyquist searching for his father and uncovering a mystery in the process. On the way he encounters strange villagers, dark rituals and a multitude of saints. This book is strange (as you would expect, and hope for), a real page turner but also so much fun to revel in the detail. Part of me hopes Nyquist will return to this locale in future outings.

[B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased as I like all things Jeff Noon and decided that I'd like this book before even reading it. But it's not my favorite book of his, not by far. What I like most in this book were the saints. I've not seen that concept before and I liked its presence. What I didn't like was that the story felt like someone's dream being told. What happens when someone tells you a dream they had? You stop caring. It usually doesn't make sense and it's not related to you in any way.

[AnnaReads · Rating 2 out of 5]

I requested this book becuase I really liked the premise but unfortunately it couldn’t keep my attention. I haven’t read the first two books in the series so that might be one of the reasons why I didn’t like the book. The other reason is that I didn’t particulary like the main character and I couln’t get into the story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Angry Robot for my copy.

[Kendra · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining pastiche of noir detective novels and M. R. James's occult stories set in small English-like towns. A bit uneven in the writing and approach, but overall a fun read, especially for fans of M. R. James, James Hynes, Angela Carter, and movies like MIdsommar.

[Ollie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third of Jeff Noon’s Nyquist Mystery series, but don’t worry if you haven’t read either of the other two; I had only read the second book (The Body Library) prior to reading this one, and can confirm that you don’t need to have read either of the other two before getting stuck into this one. Also, in true Jeff Noon fashion, it probably wouldn’t help you grasp what’s going on any better anyway. The always experimental, award winning author has made his home in metanarratives and kicked so many holes through the fourth wall that the roof is surely coming down around his ears by now. Honestly, by the end of his Arthur C. Clarke Award winning debut Vurt, I wasn’t sure if I was even real any more. I actually found Creeping Jenny one of his easier to follow novels, in that by the end I felt like I’d understood pretty much everything that had happened and didn’t feel compelled to google “Creeping Jenny ending explained.”

A creepy and pervasive sense of wrongness is established nice and early. There’s a very gothic tone throughout, although I would hesitate before putting the novel wholly in this (or indeed, any) genre. Jeff Noon’s work nicely fulfils the “WTF” part of publisher Angry Robot’s “SF, F and WTF?!” mandate. Having been summoned to the village by a set of creepy photographs that depict a mysterious tower that the residents claim to know nothing about, Nyquist’s welcome to Hoxley-on-the-Hale is not exactly warm. His first encounter is with the bizarre Sylvia Keepsake, who appears to live in the woods giving names to things - in particular, trees. She does this by writing the name she’s given them on a card, then hanging it on a particular branch.

But the creepiness and wrongness only increase as Nyquist continues his investigations. The unique central mechanic of the story is the saints worshipped in Hoxley-on-the-Hale - 360 in total, one for almost every day of the year. Not only is the worship of the saints interesting and often unsettling, it gives the novel a wonderfully paced narrative and sense of structure. The specific rules of worship placed upon the villagers begin somewhat quirkily, then become stranger and more disturbing as the story progresses. This lends the novel a real page turning quality, as I found I was keen to see exactly what rules would accompany whichever saint came next. Each day’s rituals are distinct from the one before, and all are highly imaginative. I also enjoyed the descriptions of the creepy little homemade miniatures of the saints displayed in Nyquist’s room and trying to guess what effect that particular saint would have on the day from the description. Unsurprisingly, I guessed wrong pretty much every time! Some of the observances are very off the wall, but to say more would be spoiling things. Their effect on each day tends to frustrate Nyquist’s investigations, almost as if different narrative “filters” have been applied to a traditional mystery story. On top of this, Nyquist often wakes up in his room with little or no indication of how he got there, which adds to the general sense of disorientation - he is out of his comfort zone, and we as readers are pushed out of ours along with him. This sense of disorientation also comes out in Nyquist’s conversations with the inhabitants of the village. Not only are they frequently difficult to communicate with owing to the restrictions or rules placed upon them by that day’s saint, they also often speak at right angles to Nyquist, seeming to answer a different question to that which he’s asked. The rural setting and the investigations of the main character evoke the likes of The Wicker Man, while the experimental nature of the writing and the folkloric themes recall Max Porter’s Lanny. Surely a mouth-watering prospect.

Creeping Jenny is an engrossing read, a psychological thriller with a wonderfully distinct twist and a more than worthy addition to Jeff Noon’s already impressive body of work. It’s a playful fantasy, fizzing with a dark magic, that will draw you in with its mysteries and unsettle you with its offbeat setting. Having very much enjoyed it, I will now be purchasing the first book, A Man of Shadows, to find out exactly how Noon put Nyquist through the wringer in that one.