Book Review: Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor

Rating: 4.9 stars

Twisted, haunting, and utterly addicting. I absolutely devoured this book.

Goodreads summary:

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.

I grabbed this book on a whim about ten minutes before I was supposed to board the plane. I had never heard of this book before, but the first thing I saw on the cover (besides the somehow eerily drawn chalk men) was a message from Stephen King: “If you like my stuff, you’ll like this.” So, naturally, I thought : “ok, Stephen, if you say so,” bought the book and continued on my merry way. Now, I don’t say this often, but in my mind, this book was nearly perfect. There was basically everything that I love in a book, packed into this single book. There were secrets… everywhere, layered, tortured characters, a sleepy English village with a dark past, the list goes on. I can honestly say that there was no dull moment. I was hooked from the first page to the very last. Every chapter flipped between the 1986 and 2016 - following the narrator as a child and as an adult, slowly unraveling the mysteries that he found himself tangled in since childhood. The pacing of the plot was great, and I was never was confused by the constant time jumps. However, I did say that this was ‘nearly’ perfect. The ‘nearly’ is due to two main factors: 1) There were glaring similarities to Stephen King’s IT. A group of kids, closely involved with their small town’s murderous past that has come back to haunt them in the present. Some of the Chalk Man kids even show obvious parallels to their IT ‘counterparts’. Interestingly enough, Chalk Man is partly set in 1986, which also happens to be the publication year of IT. Of course, books of the same genre often have similarities (Exhibit A: YA romance/fantasy), but I think the similarities between Chalk Man and IT were a bit too... striking. If anything, King’s message on the cover was rather apt. 2) The ending was inconclusive and a bit confusing. I felt like everything was being tied up nicely, but then all of a sudden, it was like some of the final key threads were haphazardly thrown together. I think the main issue was that the author left some things up to the readers to assume, which I did not like. I was so invested in the story and the characters that I was left feeling a bit frustrated when I instead found new questions, rather than answers. However, I think the overall excitement I felt when reading the rest of the book far outweighs my feelings towards the ending. Anyone who loves twisted thrillers, gloomy English villages, and Stephen King, should definitely give the Chalk Man a try.

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