Six Stories: A Thriller: 1

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Katherine Howard (Samantha Pauly, heartbreaking) puts a chilling spin on Britney Spears circa “ If You Seek Amy” in “ All You Wanna Do.” The song starts dark and only gets darker, with Howard sexy-baby-cooing her way through a list of all the men who have used her and abused her. “There were four choruses,” she spits after she’s finished. “That’s how much shit I’ve had to deal with.” Ingenious, inventive, gripping, unique, all and more of these words could be used to describe this wonderfully suspenseful book. "Six Stories" by Matt Wesolowski was an utter pleasure to read that I thoroughly enjoyed. There's occasionally some clumsy phrasing, but the plot's so gripping, the different perspectives so tantalising, that it barely matters. Like Serial and Making a Murderer, Six Stories is structured to manipulate your emotions, and once the story takes hold, you'll be dying to know how it ends (no pun intended). Some details ring true: the 'weird loner' vilified by the press; the teenagers' reluctance to admit to resentment, lust and bullying within their group; adults' hysteria about silly things like their tastes in music. Others are a little harder to swallow (all I will say here is: the mask thing). Scarclaw, where even in the daylight there is darkness; where monsters and sprites may be lurking in the marshes; where some ghosts never die; where In 1996, fifteen year old Tom Jeffries went missing; where his body was found a year later in the nearby marshland. The six people within the vicinity of Tom Jeffries that fateful night, twenty years earlier, are interviewed in an effort to unravel his mysterious death. The varying perspectives lend the plot twists, skew the attempts at nailing down a timeline, foil the flow of truth and manage to drum-up some doubt. What was absent was any inkling of feelings for these characters, on my part. To be blunt, I just didn’t care enough. Maybe it was the shorter length of the book or the fact that it was almost entirely a question and answer format ( am I contradicting myself now?) that hindered any sort of emotional connection on my end.

Six Stories is a popular podcast hosted by Scott King. The premise is simple, six stories from six different people all with links to a specific case told over six episodes. King uses the podcast to look into cold cases and unsolved mysteries where he delves deep in search of answers to unanswered questions and the truth surrounded the case. Horrible, right? We should have done something about it, shouldn’t we? We were fifteen; that’s what I have to keep reminding myself when I think about that day. We were just stupid children." Each book in the Six Stories series reads like the transcript of a podcast, with supplementary material, such as letters and news articles, thrown in. It’s an unusual narrative style, but it works so well. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so whenever I’m reading the latest book in the series, Scott is usually voiced in my head by whatever podca Again, not a fast-paced book but one that slowly creeps up on you, gets under your skin and sends shivers down your spine.Enter elusive investigative journalist Scott King, whose podcast examinations of complicated cases have rivalled the success of Serial, with his concealed identity making him a cult internet figure. In a series of six interviews, King attempts to work out how the dynamics of a group of idle teenagers conspired with the sinister legends surrounding the fell to result in Jeffries’ mysterious death. And who’s to blame… Matt Wesolowski brilliantly depicts a desperate and disturbed corner of north-east England in which paranoia reigns and goodness is thwarted … an exceptional storyteller' Andrew Michael Hurley It’s split into six episodes/interviews from six people directly involved with the victim of the crime. You get their take on the crime and the victim and perpetrator, you get the whole spectrum, good and bad. Let me make this absolutely clear this is a podcast that yanks at your attention as you weigh up the different points of view. Beast will turn you into just that – a hungering beast clawing at every bit of evidence, every scrap that Scott King will throw at us. I think I’ve also grown a little tired of this format. Everything seems to tie in too neatly, and the story always seems to unfold in the same way. I also find the narration of secondhand dialogue to be rather fatiguing after a while. Perhaps if I had read these books with more time in between each of them, I would find them more enjoyable? This was my least favourite of the Six Stories series. The story was not engaging, nor was it convincing.

Well, so there is a lot of precedent for fictional investigation of crime through a patchwork quilt of interviews – this was also what Truman Capote did in In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song – both brilliantly. King struggles with this issue, and the book isn’t necessarily looking to establish a definitive answer. This ambiguous conclusion hints at Demon being the final Six Stories case, at least for now. This being the sixth book, it would, after all, be quite neat. I’d be sad – I’ll be rereading these books forever, and if there were 150 more of them I’d happily spend a year reading nothing else – but Matt Wesolowski probably doesn’t want to write 150 of them, and I’m excited to read whatever he writes next regardless. Over the last few years, Matt Wesolowski's Six Stories books have become a winter tradition for me, and last year's Changeling was the highlight of the series so far. Not only was it an astoundingly clever and cunning piece of storytelling, it also brought podcast host Scott King to the fore, integrating the series' narrator into the story ingeniously. I reread it over Christmas, and I still find it astonishing. Six Stories is a novel constructed as a series of podcasts, in which an investigative journalist looks into the mysterious death of 15-year-old Tom Jeffries, which occurred twenty years ago. By interviewing people who knew Tom, podcast host Scott King attempts to paint as clear a picture as possible of the circumstances surrounding his death. huge thank you goes to Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for putting together the blog tour for Demon by Matt Wesolowski, as well as to Orenda Books and Matt Wesolowski for the gifted digital copy, which publishes in June 2022 in Canada.Listen: On the one hand, Anne “ Politics Are My Thing” Boleyn did not blue ball a king for seven years, invent her own religion, and claw her way to the top of the English monarchy to be disrespected like that. On the other hand: The song’s a bop. Whatever, it’s fun! A chilling, unpredictable and startling thriller, Six Stories is also a classic murder mystery with a modern twist, and a devastating ending. Six is constantly at risk of sliding into syrup: its feminist message is the lightest and most easily consumable one possible, some of the lyrics and lines are a little heavy handed, and the whole thing is so music-forward that the brief dialogue scenes threaten its collapse. But under international associate director Grace Taylor and Australian associate director Sharon Millerchip, the performers know when to lean into the charm and when to modulate into something softer. The story itself is a beautifully twisted tale, slowly slowly things are revealed, each “episode” bringing new information to light, not necessarily traditionally but through the reader slowly coming to know the players involved in this drama. The setting is stunningly drawn, often insanely creepy, the mythology and legend embedded into the plot makes it so much more than just a mystery – it kind of gets under your skin, whilst it is not sudden jump scary you find yourself switching the light on when you awake at 3am because you feel like something is hovering. Really beautifully done.

I bow to the podcast thriller master and I will be counting the days until we find out what case Scott King will decide to investigate next... In the mean time, I will just fill my time pestering everyone who hasn't read this series yet. And yes, that includes YOU if you haven't! Because the sheer brilliance of each experience with this series is something that nobody should miss out on. I know it's basically just a little spit in the vast ocean that is fandom life, but seriously, I've never devoured or waited for a book to come out in my life like I do MW's. All anyone has to say is that they wonder why they did it, those three. That’s how it is these days. The killers become the story. The criminals are more exciting than the victims."I still have a few questions but I admit I always do after finishing a book from this series. I think it's not the author being lazy or evasive, though. I think the fact that it's "inconclusive" has the purpose to make you think and make you draw your own conclusions. I, in fact, have some theories about certain things that happen and I like to think I'm right, and knowing the explanation would probably not be the same as the one I'm thinking, would definitely lower the quality of my experience. Tom was part of an informal adventure group called Rangers, comprising a handful of teenagers, some younger kids and their parents; Scott sets about interviewing the former Rangers, along with Haris Novak, an autistic man who was prime suspect at the time thanks to his familiarity with Scarclaw Fell, and Harry Saint Clement-Ramsay, who discovered Tom's body. It's through the interviews that an intriguing alternate narrative emerges. The interviewees recall tales of a 'marsh-hag' and the 'Beast of Belkeld', similar local legends about an evil presence lurking on the fell. Separately, several characters remember having glimpsed a spidery figure of unnatural height around the time of Tom's disappearance. Is the 'beast' a red herring, or an indication that this is more than just a murder mystery? A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***

There’s a tense, almost claustrophobic feel to the podcast chapters & it’s really tempting to race to the finish. Don’t. The devil is in the details & each of the people interviewed has a secret they’ve been keeping. Our walks with Harry are richly atmospheric & the fell itself becomes an ominous character that’s been looming over their lives for 20 years.

As the disturbing darkness unfolds you have the old and the new, local legend, fable, folklore and myth of the Ergarth Vampire combined with social media, perverse Internet games, modern life and real-world issues in an unholy union. An unusual approach in a mystery book ALWAYS gets my attention! This one is presented in a podcast-style format. OH YES. YES. I do love me a crime podcast. By the way, this book keeps referencing SERIAL, but SERIAL is kind of old news by now. Can we talk about ATLANTA MONSTER? MY FAVORITE MURDER? CRIMINAL? SWORD & SCALE?