I have been searching for a good thriller to read for some time. It has been so long since I found a really good one. The Chalk Man was recommended to me by someone in Instagram (I don’t remember who).
Synopsis
In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead.
That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
My Take
To be honest, even the blurb didn’t sound that interesting to me. But since this was a recommendation and it had a huge hype online, I decided to give it a try.
I always associate thrillers with a fast paced book. But this book was so slow, I struggled to finish it. The book started off kind of ok. Eddie’s childhood was quite interesting to read. His obsession with collecting things makes us wonder about his character. During his childhood, he and his friends are introduced to the concept of using chalk men as secret messages. Other than this, the chalk men don’t have much of a role in the story. Yes it plays a kind of prominent role in his childhood. But as a grown up, the chalk men don’t have much of a significance. I feel it was inserted in the story line of Eddie’s adulthood just so that it can justify the title of the book.
There were a few twists and turns in the book that I never saw coming. But nothing that kept me captivated. It might have been because of the way the book is written. The story has a lot of potential. If it had been developed a bit more and written in a more fast paced manner, the book would have turned out more like a thriller. The killer was kind of a surprise. But by the end, I didn’t really care who the killer was. I was just aiming to finish the book.
My Rating
There are people who have liked this book. But if you are like me and like fast paced thrillers, then this is not for you. My rating would be 2.5⭐