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Summary
Summary
Just about everyone knows a family like the Radleys. Many of us grew up next door to one. They are a modern family, averagely content, averagely dysfunctional, living in a staid and quiet suburban English town. Peter is an overworked doctor whose wife, Helen, has become increasingly remote and uncommunicative. Rowan, their teenage son, is being bullied at school, and their anemic daughter, Clara, has recently become a vegan. They are typical, that is, save for one devastating exception: Peter and Helen are vampires and have for seventeen years been abstaining by choice from a life of chasing blood in the hope that their children could live normal lives.One night, Clara finds herself driven to commit a shocking and disturbingly satisfying act of violence, and her parents are forced to explain their history of shadows and lies. A police investigation is launched that uncovers a richness of vampire history heretofore unknown to the general public. And when the malevolent and alluring Uncle Will, a practicing vampire, arrives to throw the police off Clara's trail, he winds up throwing the whole house into temptation and turmoil and unleashing a host of dark secrets that threaten the Radleys marriage.The Radleysis a moving, thrilling, and radiant domestic novel that explores with daring the lengths a parent will go to protect a child, what it costs you to deny your identity, the undeniable appeal of sin, and the everlasting, iridescent bonds of family love. Read it and ask what we grow into when we grow up, and what we gain and lose when we deny our appetites.
Author Notes
Matt Haig was born on July 3, 1975 in Sheffield. He attended the University of Hull where he studied English and History. He has since become a British novelist and journalist. He has authored both fiction and non-fiction for children and adults. His non-fiction title "Reasons to Stay Alive" became a Sunday Times bestseller. His bestselling children's novel, A Boy Called Christmas is now being adapted for film. His other works include: The Last Family in England, The Dead Fathers Club, Shadow Forest, The Possession of Mr. Cave, How to Stop Time and Runaway Troll.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This witty vampire novel from British author Haig (The Possession of Mr. Cave) provides what jaded fans of the Twilight series need, not True Blood exactly, but some fresh blood in the form of a true blue family. Dr. Peter Radley and his wife, Helen, have fled wild London for the village of Bishopthorpe, where they live an outwardly ordinary life. The Radleys, who follow the rules of The Abstainer's Handbook (e.g., "Be proud to act like a normal human being"), haven't told their 15-year-old vegan daughter, Clara, and 17-year-old son, Rowan, who's troubled by nightmares, that they're really vampires. A crisis occurs when a drunken classmate of Clara's, Stuart Harper, attacks her on her way home from a party and inadvertently awakens the girl's blood thirst. Peter's call for help to his brother, Will, a practicing vampire, leads to scary consequences. The likable Clara and Rowan will appeal to both adult and teen readers. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The Radleys Peter, Helen, and their two teenagers, Clara and Rowan live outwardly in domestic bliss, but it comes at a price: Peter and Helen are abstainers, vampires who view blood drinking as an addiction, and keeping up the facade has strained their marriage. They've kept the truth from their children, but this backfires when Clara's vegan diet (dangerous for abstainers, who need meat) causes uncontrollable blood lust, culminating in her ripping a boy to shreds. Enter Uncle Will, an unrepentant vampire, whose subtle and dangerous charm brings even more trouble. This is a dark domestic drama about a loving but dysfunctional family that just happens to be vampires, though delicious moments of gore maintain its horror connection. Excerpts from The Abstainer's Handbook, which the Radley's rigidly follow, cleverly mimic self-help manuals, and Haig's sly digs at suburbia's forced banality and conformity are on target. As Rowan says, Everyone represses everything. . . . We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins. A white-picket-fence-style happy ending caps off this unusual blended story.--Hutley, Krista Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE vampire novel is a crowded genre these days. To distinguish itself, a book will need inventiveness, wit, beauty, truth and a narrative within which these attributes can flourish. "The Radleys," by Matt Haig, has got them, if sometimes in alloyed form. Let's start with the premise. A nuclear family of four vampires - mom, dad, sister, brother - live in the English suburb of Bishopthorpe. The parents know what they are, and have concealed this knowledge from their teenage kids, who, inadvertently abstaining from the blood they don't know they need to drink, suffer from nausea, insomnia, weakness, "photodermatosis" and mortifying high school unpopularity. Then one night, attacked by a large ogre of a boy, the daughter discovers her true nature the hard way, precipitating a vampire family crisis. Into this rushes the dad's dastardly but alluring brother, who freely does all the cruel, exciting things the parents have protected their children from and have painfully denied themselves for years. The stage is now set for the moral conflict that Haig adroitly develops. The moral stakes, so to speak, are spelled out in "The Abstainer's Handbook," a self-help guide for "blood addicts" who have chosen not to give in to their "overwhelming blood thirst" (or O.B.T. for short). Its anxious homilies and admonishments appear as epigraphs throughout the novel. Freud would appreciate its assertion that "civilization only works if instincts are suppressed," though he might warn against its methodology: "Confine your imagination." One instinctual activity that gets suppressed, at least in the Radleys' marriage, is sex, because sex leads to mutual blood sucking, which in turn leads to nonmutual blood sucking. As in many suburban marriages of story and song, the wife, Helen, has her foot on the brake while the husband, Peter, tries fruitlessly to work the accelerator. Sex is "just a hug in motion," he silently protests, "a bloodless piece of body friction," one of the novel's many fine instances of Haig's wit. As befits a vampire story, the wit tends to be sharp, and is often aimed at the mores and folkways of suburban life. An obnoxious neighbor (who, while making love to his wife, suddenly thinks of the polyethylene-covered sofa in his boyhood home) suspects the Radleys of crimes against humanity far worse than draining the blood from its neck: "They used to live in London and . . . they probably voted Liberal Democrat and they went to the theater a lot to see things that weren't musicals." Following Keats (who, in the world of this novel, was a vampire, as were "all the Romantics, except Wordsworth") I'll combine my observations about beauty and truth. There are lovely, incisive passages in "The Radleys." A teenager being whisked away from a party by her angry father "stares out at the hedges speeding by, wishing she could have been born something else, a little thrush or starling or something that could just fly away." This is especially striking because such creatures do fly away from this girl's best friends, the Radley kids, with whom her fate is intertwined. And here's another great image: when Clara Radley returns home after her accidental first vampire experience, her brother, Rowan, sees her "covered in what looked like blood. And she was really covered, the way a newborn baby is." In doing something ghastly, she has been reborn as an innocent, an economical and understated image of vampirism's moral ambiguity. ELSEWHERE, unfortunately, Haig tends towards overstatement and repetition. Many times an abstaining vampire longingly smells the blood beneath the skin of an unsuspecting human's wrist or neck; many times the sun bothers the vampires; animals flee from them; and the Radley parents must lie to humans about their true nature and past and current misdeeds. "The Abstainer's Handbook," for all its uptight charm, often repeats as instruction what has just been or is about to be narrated. This novel's central moral problem - that blood sucking is exhilarating yet morally wrong, while abstention is virtuous yet tedious and false - is sometimes hammered home all too explicitly and schematically. Mental states are too often simply announced rather than evoked: "Something was going wrong in Will's psyche"; "Rowan seems perturbed by this information"; "Helen is raw with shame." By the time I had arrived at someone's "untold fear," I wished the fear had in fact remained untold. Haig has said that he wrote "The Radleys" concurrently as a novel and a screenplay. With its striking visuals, snappy dialogue and high-energy plot, the story should make an appealing movie. But while the plot propels us forward, the novel's big themes tend to get repeated rather than developed. The element of this story that I found most moving, even more than the scary, thrilling, but by now familiar vampire stuff, was a wife's betrayal of her husband. It occurred long in the past, and remains unknown to him, but continues to reverberate in the marriage, as in this moment near the end of a painful argument: "In the small dark cavern she has made with her duvet, her uncontrollable self yearns deeply for that feeling she had years ago, when she had forgotten about all the problems in her life - work, the despairing visits to her dying father, and a wedding she didn't know she wanted." Here, Haig does justice to the effect of this betrayal on the souls of his characters - the startling pleasure and the lasting woe - proving himself a novelist of considerable seriousness and talent. Matthew Sharpe's latest novel is "You Were Wrong."
Guardian Review
Matt Haig must be getting pretty weary of the eye-rolling and knowing winks he receives whenever he mentions that his latest novel deals with vampires. He probably has to wear a T-shirt bearing the slogan "No, I haven't jumped on the bandwagon!" The Twilight saga has been such an eclipsing success (along with the myriad of imitators it's spawned) that it appears to have tainted this particular subgenre for so many. However, very recently teenagers have also enjoyed the likes of Marcus Sedgwick's sublime My Swordhand Is Singing and its sequel, and Darren Shan's gloriously schlocky The Saga of Darren Shan. Since Polidori back in 1819, the vampire has been a persistent presence on our bookshelves because of its shape-shifting mythology, spilling over with possibilities for the imaginative author. Haig's very original spin on the myth is that vampires are "blood-addicts" rather than the stereotypical undead creatures of the night. Although they live much longer than the average human, these vampires are not immortal and, importantly, can survive without drinking blood. Blood is an addictive drug to them, albeit one that grants powers of strength, flight and mesmerism. And this addiction can, with discipline and guidance from The Abstainer's Handbook, be overcome. Peter and Helen Radley are living as quiet a life as possible with their teenage children, Rowan and Clara, in the Yorkshire village of Bishopthorpe. He's a GP, she's an amateur artist. They're both abstaining vampires, both achy, tired and repressed - things they wouldn't be if they went back on the blood. They have never told their children the truth, but when Clara kills a sexually aggressive boy in a burst of vampiric instinct, there's little chance of keeping the secret any more. The parents are desperate to hide the horror from the neighbours, while the kids are thrown into a grown-up world of terrifying knowledge. Fighting the addiction becomes a challenge for everyone as the pressure builds. The bite-size chapters guide the reader from one viewpoint to another, which feels particularly important for this crossover novel published in a new Walker-Canongate collaboration, with one cover for young adults and another for big adults. Mum, Dad, son and daughter all get their fair share of the limelight. There are plenty of jabs at the middle classes and midlife crises to keep older readers in on the joke, but it's the teenagers who linger longest after the final page. Haig's depiction of teen politics is spot on. There's fun to be had with Clara's attempts to be vegan, while Rowan's journey from over-sensitive bully-fodder to fanged and vengeful warrior is at once insightful, frightening and uplifting. When the Alfonso Cuaron film of The Radleys, currently in development, gets made, no doubt the big-name actor will get the role of Uncle Will. Estranged from the family, Will is called back by the panicked parents to help keep a lid on things. But he has never been one for abstinence or repression - he's a splendidly evil yet believable character, because his cruelty is rooted in human rather than supernatural passions. He's a monster, who just happens also to be a vampire. Haig pays just about enough respect to the conventions of the genre that the average vampire fan should find lots to enjoy, but it's the blackly comic dissection of the family that makes this book stand out. As The Abstainer's Handbook says: "Do your bit for society and hide those dark desires." But where's the fun in that? Keith Gray's Losing It is published by Andersen. To order The Radleys for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - Keith Gray Matt Haig must be getting pretty weary of the eye-rolling and knowing winks he receives whenever he mentions that his latest novel deals with vampires. He probably has to wear a T-shirt bearing the slogan "No, I haven't jumped on the bandwagon!" The Twilight saga has been such an eclipsing success (along with the myriad of imitators it's spawned) that it appears to have tainted this particular subgenre for so many. However, very recently teenagers have also enjoyed the likes of Marcus Sedgwick's sublime My Swordhand Is Singing and its sequel, and Darren Shan's gloriously schlocky The Saga of Darren Shan. Since Polidori back in 1819, the vampire has been a persistent presence on our bookshelves because of its shape-shifting mythology, spilling over with possibilities for the imaginative author. - Keith Gray.
Library Journal Review
Dark humor pervades Haig's (The Possession of Dr. Cave) entertaining vampire family soap opera. While Helen was engaged to Peter Radley 17 years ago, his brother Will secretly whisked her off for one sex-filled "vampire conversion" night in Paris. A pregnant Helen then told Peter the baby was his, and together they decided to live like normal people and follow the guidelines set down by the Abstainer's Handbook, written for those who no longer wish to live the traditional vampire life. Complications arise as their children, Rowan (Will's biological son) and Clara, begin to acquire vampire characteristics. Clara is the first to change when one night a thuggish classmate attacks her. The fangs pop out, and Clara does what any vampire would naturally do. At last Helen agrees with Peter that it is time to explain their heritage to the children. At first the Radleys seem to be the stereotypical dysfunctional family, but each of them gradually shows a depth of character that helps them to pull together when outside forces attempt to destroy them. VERDICT This witty novel offers a refreshing take on an oversaturated genre. Already optioned by director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), this is sure to attract reader attention. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/10.]-Patricia Altner, Columbia, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Orchard Lane It is a quiet place, especially at night. Too quiet, you'd be entitled to think, for any kind of monster to live among its pretty, tree-shaded lanes. Indeed, at three o'clock in the morning in the village of Bishopthorpe, it is easy to believe the lie indulged in by its residents--that it is a place for good and quiet people to live good and quiet lives. At this hour, the only sounds to be heard are those made by nature itself. The hoot of an owl, the faraway bark of a dog, or, on a breezy night like this one, the wind's obscure whisper through the sycamore trees. Even if you stood on the main street, right outside the pub or the Hungry Gannet delicatessen, you wouldn't often hear any traffic or be able to see the abusive graffiti that decorates the former post office (though the word FREAK might just be legible if you strain your eyes). Away from the main street, on somewhere like Orchard Lane, if you took a nocturnal stroll past the detached period homes lived in by solicitors and doctors and project managers, you would find all their lights off and curtains drawn, secluding them from the night. Or you would until you reached number seventeen, where you'd notice the glow from an upstairs window filtering through the curtains. And if you stopped, sucked in that cool and consoling fresh night air, you would at first see that number seventeen is a house otherwise in tune with those around it. Maybe not quite as grand as its closest neighbor, number nineteen, with its wide driveway and elegant Regency features, but still one that holds its own. It is a house that looks and feels precisely how a village family home should look--not too big, but big enough, with nothing out of place or jarring on the eye. A dream house in many ways, as estate agents would tell you, and certainly perfect to raise children. But after a moment you'd notice there is something not right about it. No, maybe "notice" is too strong. Perhaps you wouldn't actively realize that even nature seems to be quieter around this house, that you can't hear any birds or anything else at all. Yet there might be an instinctive sense that would make you wonder about that glowing light and feel a coldness that doesn't come from the night air. If that feeling grew, it might become a fear that would make you want to leave the scene and run away, but you probably wouldn't. You would observe the nice house and the moderately expensive car parked outside and think that this is the property of perfectly normal human beings who pose no threat to the outside world. If you let yourself think this, you would be wrong. For 17 Orchard Lane is the home of the Radleys, and despite their very best efforts, they are anything but normal. © 2010 Matt Haig Excerpted from The Radleys by Matt Haig All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.