The last days of Leda Grey

This book had a lot to love in theory. It ticked a bunch of boxes that interest me, although I admit there is a bit of a glut in the silver-screen haunting market lately and the silent film era this novel is based around has been worked to death by now. Still, it has a weirdo living in a falling-down house, coastal erosion, badly-behaved old women, and more goth fashion and make-up markers than you could shake a stick at. So many dilapidated taxidermy animals. Tsunamis of beetles. Fake Egyptian bling all over the place. Fox also adds a long list of homework reading she did before she wrote this book, which will no doubt be welcomed by enthusiasts of that era of cinema.

The only problem is, she can't really write. Not for more than a couple of paragraphs at a time. She's usually fine describing the journalist POV narrator on his own, and the scenes where he creeps about the garden of former movie star Leda Grey with his camera, or sweats and writhes photogenically in his sticky summer boardinghouse (you've guessed it, it's the 1976 UK Long Hot Summer again, apparently caught in an endless film loop of its own) are the best bits of the novel. There are one or two really good eerie effects when the lad is on his own with his thoughts.

But when people start actually talking to each other, the wheels soon come off. There's no nice way of saying it: Fox has a tin ear for dialogue, and the olde-worlde writing style she essays in Leda's lengthy diary mopes is no better. It's sad in a way, because Fox really throws everything at this job, piling on the dysfunction (one character is a tragic blond curly-haired orphan AND a gay transvestite AND an epileptic AND a psychic AND a tortured artiste, beat that Candy Darling) to an alarming extent, along with endless shovelfuls of glitter and filth. Well, descriptions of glitter and filth, I should say. It never quite feels real. Again and again the lack of believable character interaction and watery "voice" drags things back to the ground, like a swan that's eaten too many dustbin hamburgers. (And yes, by the way, there is some pretty major swan action in this book. It's got a woman called Leda in it, and in Sunday Times Bestseller world that makes the appearance of a swan compulsory. Though there is actually a very funny bit about the taxidermied swan so I don't begrudge the obviousness.)

It's not just the dialogue, either. Fox's, well, I suppose we have to call it "style", is a weird palimpsest where literary A-level essay analyses of things the reader has just seen are routinely dumped on top of any significant event or effect. We are told scenes and imagery are "gothic", "exotic", "mysterious", that images or people "exuded sexuality" and so on, all this terrible book blogger's talk. I'm genuinely surprised each chapter doesn't end with a list of TV Tropes footnotes. Lady, I paid actual money for your book, let ME decide what stuff Means.

Though since we're talking of tropes, this book also has one of my least favourite ever: the tortured genderqueer character as handly plot mechanism (Surprise! It's a boy/girl/whatever!) Fox's implementation of this is slightly less crude and a lot more sympathetic than what you might see in, say, Ace Ventura Pet Detective 2, but you still get a scent of exploitation. The queer character's identity never stops being subservient to the needs of the plot. And overall, this is a work of remarkable straightness considering the degree of camp inherent to the subject. So yeah, if you like this sort of theme for god's sake go and get a book by Gemma Files or Helen Grant or something.