The Every Dead Thing Book Club/Reread: John Connolly's Every Dead Thing (Part I)
Column by Jordan S.
Introduction
Welcome to the Every Dead Thing Book Club! In this column, I’ll do rereads of some of the best books that merge the horror and detective genres. We’ll be starting with the entirety of the Charlie Parker series (which is also where this book club gets its name) and that means starting with the first book, Every Dead Thing. Along the way, I’ll provide a summary and then discuss a variety of recurring themes and characters that the book talks about. I’ll then offer a review/general discussion of my thoughts at the end. If you want to read along, please do and let me know in the comments what you think.
In this installment, we’ll be talking about Part One of Every Dead Thing. We will be introduced to the tragic hero, Charlie Parker and the mystery of his wife and daughter’s murder and the case of a missing young woman with ties to a crime family. This is a pretty brutal book so a bunch of content warnings apply, specifically; murder, violence against women and children, foul language, lots of violence, horror book stuff, body horror, cosmic horror, racism,etc. I’ve tried to minimize all discussion of that in my summary but especially with the climax of this first section, I wasn’t able to completely avoid some of that.
Summary
This book jumps around timelines pretty steadily so we’ll break it down in chronological order.
Charlie “Bird” Parker is a private investigator/former NYPD cop. His wife (Susan) and daughter (Jennifer) were tortured and murdered. He was out of the house after having an argument with his wife and was down the block in the local bar, getting drunk. When arrived home, he found his family murdered and their faces taken by whomever had killed them.
Two weeks later, Charlie joins a group of the detectives investigating the case to hear a possible psychological profile of the killer from criminologist, Rachel Wolfe.
We get a thread of Charlie meeting with FBI Agent Woolrich in New Orleans. Woolrich has found a Creole psychic who he thinks can help Charlie track down who killed his wife and daughter. They go and visit the woman in the bayou. She says that the ghost of a young girl is calling out to her from the bayou. She says the ghost girl calls the killer the “Traveling Man.”
Essentially this is the end of his police career. Some view him suspiciously as the possible culprit. Others hold him at an arm’s length because they fear that what happened to him could happen to them if they get too close. Still others see this an opportunity to get rid of someone who was already a problematic figure in the NYPD.
Flash forward to Charlie Parker taking a job on someone who skipped bail, “Fat” Ollie Watts. While chasing him down, Ollie and his girlfriend are killed by a mysterious shooter. Charlie pursues and shoots the killer, killing him as well.
Charlie finds himself back in the interrogation room where they had the profiling meeting and is interrogated not only by Walter Cole but by FBI Special Agent Ross and Detective Barth, from Robbery. This interrogation further serves as evidence to Charlie that he is increasingly distrusted by the NYPD.
Walter invites Charlie to his home and they have a tense session over drinks. Walter asks Charlie to look into the case of a missing young woman named Catherine Demeter. Catherine was dating the son (Stephen) of a wealthy woman named Isobel Barton. Stephen was linked to the Ferrera crime family through his friend Sonny Ferrera.
Charlie goes and meets with a group of small-time crooks and hustlers at an auto shop used by Willie Brew. He does small talk with the group when the group is joined by Angel and Louis. A gay couple, both these figures are extremely intimidating to everyone in the group except Charlie. Angel is a garishly dressed master burglar who Charlie had helped out of trouble and had become a trusted informant and friend. Louis is a highly skilled contract killer. Charlie leaves with Louis and Angel and finds himself musing about how as he feels increasingly distant from Walter, he finds himself increasingly trusting and feeling a friendship towards Angel and Louis. They ask him what he’s doing getting involved with Fat Ollie and the Ferrera crime family. They tell him that someone has put a hit out on him and they figure it’s mostly likely Sonny or Bobby Sciarra, Don Ferrera’s most trusted enforcer and true heir apparent of the Ferrara crime family since the last biological heir, Sonny, is an idiot.
With this we are introduced to Angel and Louis and thus this is the first appearance of the best supporting characters in literary history. This is a monumental moment, in my personal opinion.
Stephen Barton is found dead and Walter calls Charlie to the crime scene. He asks if there’s any updates and Charlie leaves to meet with Don Ferrera. Bobby is waiting outside the Ferrera estate and makes a joke about Charlie’s wife and daughter and Charlie has to fight the urge to kill him. Don Ferrera asks for Charlie to be sent in and they have a conversation about the death of Barton and the bounty put on his head. Don Ferrera says Sonny’s his own man but that he’ll have it looked into. Charlie leaves.
Charlie then gets interrogated by Ross and Hernandez. We learn a bit more about both of them. Ross had made his name with the Truck Hijack Squad decades earlier and several high-profile RICO cases. They wonder if he’s getting involved with the Ferrera’s and he tells them he’s working on a confidential case
Charlie then meets with Isobel Barton who is distraught over the death of her son. He tells Barton that he’s going to Virginia (Catherine Demeter’s hometown is there) and that he’ll call if he finds anything out.He goes home to pack and receives a cell phone call while packing his overnight bag. The artificial voice says that while Parker and him have never met, he was with Charlie’s wife and daughter in their final moments. Charlie realizes he’s talking to the Traveling Man as the caller begins to tell him gruesome details about their killing that were never made public. The Traveling Man then says, “You brought me into your life. For you, I flamed into being. I have been waiting so long for your call.” He continues to talk about how his kind’s flaw is their lusting for humanity and the voice changes into the voice of “a god or a devil.” Charlie looks at the caller id and sees that it’s the phone number of the pay phone outside his house. He rushes out the front door, nearly knocking a child with a parcel over and runs to the now empty phone booth. He runs back and the child is being comforted by a neighbor. The boy says the package was supposed to be delivered and that a man asked him to deliver it or “he’d cut my face off.” When Charlie asks what the man gave him the package looks like the boy says his face was darkness and that he didn’t have any face. Charlie opens the parcel to find the face of his daughter in a jar and begins to scream. Walter and forensics come over and Charlie tells him everything that the caller said. Charlie says, “He thinks he’s a demon, Walter.” They discuss what the kid said about him not having a face and Charlie wonders if he might actually be a demon. We then get a flashback to bits and pieces of Charlie’s relationship with Susan and his friendship with Walter and what happened to him between the murders and the start of the book. He goes to Maine with the purpose of going to the house he inherited from his grandfather and instead finds himself hunting a suspected child killer. He gets drunk in a bar and is gathered up by a group from a commune in Maine where he spends the next six weeks getting clean. He then returns to New York and hunts down a pedophile named Johnny Friday, who he beats to death in a bathroom. Despite the monstrousness of Friday’s crimes, Charlie finds himself tormented with the fact he took on the role of judge, jury and executioner with Friday. Back in the present, Charlie calls Rachel Wolfe and they have a conversation about the psyche of the Traveling Man. He calls Walter Cole and tells him he is going to be traveling and following up on the case of Catherine Demeter. Charlie then travels to Virginia.
Epic Epigraphs:
“For I am every dead thing… I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.”
John Donne, “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day”
I’m bad at reading poetry but I guess we’ll try our best to figure out how this relates to the first section of Every Dead Thing. Most obvious connection is that this is where the book gets its title and thus our column, so that’s exciting. The secondary connection, and probably a more interesting discussion is that there are probably two characters that could be described as being the person talked about as the epigraph describes: Charlie and the Traveling Man. Charlie is defined by his darkness and the death and absence of his wife and daughter. In many ways, he has been recreated by their deaths and turned into something more violent and driven. We will learn more about this descent in the next section but Charlie has lashed out in the aftermath of the murders and has crossed lines that have led to both the destruction of his relationship with Walter and his overall rejection by members of the NYPD. However, this recreation has also made him have a greater relationship with people like Louis and Angel.
If Charlie is figuratively described by this epigraph, we learn that the Traveling Man is literally this epigraph. His artificial voice is made of the voices of other dead individuals, maybe even including Charlie’s wife and daughter, and he has a face of darkness. He’s also the bringer of a lot of death over the course of this story. Overall, solid epigraph choice John. 10/10.
Our Better Angels…and Louis?
We are formally introduced to Angel and Louis in this book and boy oh boy are they awesome. Even in this small appearance, we learn a lot about them. We learn that they are a couple and that one is a burglar and the other a contract killer. We learn that Angel and Charlie have a relationship that started as an informant/cop relationship but became a true friendship, especially after the death of Susan and Jennifer. Not a lot from them yet but this section will definitely be growing as we continue.
Death and All His Friends:
Oh boy, oh boy. I had forgotten how many recurring characters we meet in this first section.
First up, Walter Cole. Honestly, I think Walter has one of the best overall character arcs of the whole series. He knew Charlie’s late father, became best friends with Charlie before becoming his partner and then the events of this part take place and a huge wedge is driven between them. Over time, we’ll see this relationship grow and become something really cool but for now it’s not in a great place.
Rachel Wolfe also makes her first appearance. This book is really the only one that really uses her and her skill as a criminal profiler to the extent that it should. However, she remains an increasingly important character in this series. We’ll talk about her a lot more.
Special Agent Ross is the third significant recurring character we are introduced to. He matters a lot for this book before returning later in the series. It’s hard to read this book without the lens of seeing him in later books as a more omnipresent presence who knows a lot more than he lets on.
Proper Villains:
Let’s talk about the big bad of this first book, the Traveling Man. He’s the serial killer that tortured and murdered Charlie’s wife and daughter and he’s the primary antagonist of this first book. In this first part of the book, we meet him mostly through his actions and reputation, at least until the very end of Part One. He’s a brutal killer who cuts off the faces of his victims. As of now, we only have three purported victims of this killer, specifically Susan, Jennifer and the girl in Louisiana. This body count will only climb as the book continues. As it stands, the Traveling Man is probably not in my list of the most interesting villains Connolly has created. It’s very much something that would feel at home in a Hannibal Lecter novel or an episode of Criminal Minds. I think I prefer the more outlandish villains in the Parker series and we’ll be getting to them eventually since Abel and Stritch are in the next book and Pudd is in book three.
We are also introduced to some sub-villains, specifically the Ferreras and Bobby Sciora. As of now, they are mainly examples of the mobster type villain that is a recurring archetype in the Charlie Parker series. As far as this archetype goes, they are pretty solid representatives of it.
Spiritual Matters:
This series definitely will go hog wild in terms of the paranormal/supernatural over the course of its run (just wait for Quayle which we should get to sometime in this column next year). As it stands in this book, though, we are starting off pretty low on the charts of paranormal. Some vague references to Charlie being haunted by his wife and daughter but at this point those seem to be pretty metaphysical and not literal. The biggest hints of the supernatural are from the Louisiana woman who claims to talk to spirits and the Traveling Man, who thinks he’s a demon and references biblical passages involving the nephilim in his phone call to Charlie.
Killer Quotations:
My favorite quote in this book is from the prologue:
“They come to me sometimes, in the margin between sleeping and waking, when the streets are silent in the dark or as dawn seeps through the gap in the curtains, bathing the room in a dim, slow-glowing light. They come to me and I see their shapes in the darkness, my wife and child together, watching me silently, ensanguined in unquiet death. They come to me, their breath in the night breezes that brush my cheek and their fingers in the tree branches tapping at my window. They come to me and I am no longer alone.”
This quote is a great prelude to what to expect from the entire Charlie Parker series. Poetic musings on death, ghosts, and loneliness. Expect lots more of that to come.
Gnome Thoughts:
Every Dead Thing was actually the last Charlie Parker book I read when I first started the series. I think when I started reading them the newest was A Game of Ghosts and I read in the order of Killing Kind through A Game of Ghosts and then read Dark Hollow and then this one. I think I stand by my reading because I’m not sure I would have kept reading the series if I had started with this one. It’s brutal in a way that is at times very off-putting and darker than most books I like to read. However, it’s all the start to my favorite series of all time and I live with those paradoxes.
On this reread (the first I’ve done for this book compared to like the two dozen times I’ve reread some of the books in this series) I’m struck by how Charlie is very much in a liminal place at the start of this book. He’s not a good man and he’s not a bad man. He’s waiting to see what he needs to become. Charlie is surrounded by shoulder angels and shoulder demons and it’s not always clear which is which. Louis and Angel are probably shoulder demons but they are also the most positive presences in Charlie’s life currently and and really forever. Walter is obviously the most angelic, I guess but he’s also effectively abandoned Charlie except when he needs someone to do dirty work for him. I guess my biggest surprise is how much this book leads to the surprise of Walter and Charlie’s relationship growing again.
Overall, this book is a brutal start to one of the best series of all time and I’m excited to start this journey with you all. Please come back in a couple weeks for our next dive into the creepy and eldritch world of Charlie Parker as he makes a trip to Virginia that goes….poorly.