Blog tour: Secret Lives of the Dead by Tim Lebbon

This post is part of a blog tour organised by ZooLoo’s Book Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘When Jodi, BB and Matt decide to burgle a derelict country home as a thrilling dare, they become embroiled in a twisted legacy of supernatural terror. There are rumours of a bizarre curse hanging over the hoard of antiques and jewellery within the house. And unbeknownst to the others, one member of the trio has darker motives for breaking into the property.

‘Lem is a brutal man obsessed with a gruesome family legend. He is determined to right the wrongs of the past and lift the curse placed on his bloodline. By completing the work of his father and bringing a bizarre selection of scattered relics back together, he hopes to be free of the malign influence that has hounded every generation of his family for two centuries.

‘Across a single day a deadly pursuit will culminate on the desolate, storm-swept Crow Island, and those involved are given cause to wonder: can believing in a curse deeply enough bring its own bad luck?’

In Secret Lives of the Dead, by Tim Lebbon, thirty-something Jodi persuades her boyfriend BB, and the couple’s friend Matt, to break into the long-abandoned Morgan Manor with her, on the pretext of stealing valuables they can sell.

However, Jodi is secretly on the lookout for a particular artefact. It’s a relic Lem – the man who killed her father 15 years previously – is desperate to get his hands on, as part of a lifelong, all-consuming quest to break a curse on his family. For Jodi, keeping Lem from this last piece of the jigsaw is the perfect revenge.

Unfortunately for the three friends, Lem turns up at Morgan Manor on the same morning they do, kicking off a violent game of cat-and-mouse there’s no coming back from – whether they survive or not.

Secret Lives of the Dead is a wild and fun ride. Playing out over 24 hours (bar flashbacks that provide crucial context), the characters lurch from crisis to crisis and make desperate decisions while under extreme pressure.

The horror elements are accounted for by Lem’s mission, and the lengths he’s more than willing to go to in order to complete it. For him, violence and murder are nothing more than necessary steps in his quest to complete the set of gruesome pieces needed to lift the witch’s curse. Jodi’s father aside, it’s darkly humorous how gorily and callously Lem will dispatch people in the name of “blooding” the relics, or simply dispose of his latest intellectually-challenged sidekick when they start to annoy him.

In fact, Lem is a fascinating, if repulsive, character more generally. We go back to his childhood to learn how both his father and grandfather died in their own violent pursuits of the relics, and how his mother charged him with continuing their work shortly after his father died, when Lem was at an impressionable age.

We find out that Lem’s mother subsequently died in a freak accident, and that he’s had a number of near-death experiences where he’s gone into the light just for his ancestors to send him back to finish the job, bolstering his belief in the curse. This led me to consider whether the curse was “real”, or if Lem was seeing patterns in coincidences and attributing the consequences of his own violent actions to cursed luck.

There are additional questions around nature and nurture: is it inevitable Lem has led the life he has, not because of any curse, but because he comes from a long line of violent men, had adverse experiences in childhood on top of that, and felt he had no choice but to follow in their footsteps?

After all, like Lem, Jodi lost both of her parents young – her mother to cancer, and her father at Lem’s hands – yet she has positive memories of childhood, runs (and keeps running) after seeing Lem kill her father, and plots a frustrating, rather than violent revenge on him, even if that plan couldn’t go much more awry in the execution.

There were a couple of other things I particularly appreciated about Secret Lives of the Dead. One was the sense of place: with its detailed geography, haunts and landmarks, and quirky local “characters”, Mariton feels like a real small British town. The other was the heartwarming friendship between BB and Matt, which goes all the way back to pre-school, and has therefore accumulated a great deal of lore.

Secret Lives of the Dead is a dark and entertaining horror thriller.