Newman’s thriller plumbs new depths

T.J. Newman’s 2021 novel Falling was a spectacular debut, a brilliantly constructed thriller set on board a commercial airliner en route to its destination.

Newman’s second novel, Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 (Avid Reader Press, 352 pages, $15), is remarkably ambitious, for two reasons: it’s not a sequel, which means there’s an entirely new cast of characters, and it takes place underwater.

The setup: soon after takeoff, an Airbus A321 goes down in the Pacific Ocean. It comes to rest a few hundred metres below the surface, mostly intact. There are survivors, but they have a limited (and rapidly diminishing) supply of air.

Falling was a straight-up thriller, with a hero and a villain with an evil plan. Drowning is rather different. There’s no villain in the traditional bad-guy sense, and there are a lot of heroes: the men and women who have to create, essentially from scratch, a procedure for rescuing people from a submerged aircraft.

Claustrophobes beware: Newman, a former flight attendant, brings a level of realism to the story that renders some scenes excruciating.

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Veil (Blackstone Publishing, 368 pages, $28) by Jonathan Janz is the kind of horror novel that scares you on a visceral level.

Around the world, in the dark of night, people are disappearing. At first it seems like a rash of kidnappings (but why?), until the disappearances begin to happen in the daylight hours: people being pulled by some invisible force, screaming for their lives, just vanishing from the world.

John Calhoun, a schoolteacher, loses his wife and son. He’s determined to keep his daughter safe, no matter the cost, but how do you defend yourself against an enemy you can’t see?

The book’s descriptions are so arrestingly vivid that it should come with a warning: “Don’t read this book right before bed unless you want to have graphic nightmares.” For horror fans, this is a must-read.

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Also a must-read, at least for Stephen King fans, is his newest collection of short fiction, You Like it Darker (Scribner, 528 pages, $28).

There are a dozen stories here varying in length, subject matter and writing style. Almost half the pieces, including the brilliant novella Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream (worth the price of the book alone), have never been published before. King writes about love, tragedy and really scary things and he does it beautifully. It’s not an exaggeration to say this book contains some of his best work.

Oh, and a special treat: a supporting character from one of King’s most popular novels takes centre stage in a story that isn’t precisely a sequel to that novel, but does tie up one or two loose ends. (No spoilers.)

King has had a remarkable career, 50 years and still going strong, and this wonderful collection reminds us why he’s been around so long.

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In 2021’s The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz told the story of a one-hit-wonder novelist, Jacob Finch Bonner, who stole a kick-ass plot from another writer, turned it into a novel, got a bestseller out of it and then watched his life fall apart.

The Sequel (Celadon Books, 304 pages, $26) is a sequel to The Plot, in which Finch’s widow becomes a bestselling author and faces — much as her late husband did — accusations of literary impropriety.

The story builds on what the author established in The Plot, taking certain elements and coming at them from new and surprising angles. Korelitz is also having some fun with the whole idea of a sequel: each chapter title is the title of a literary sequel, for example, and there’s some metafiction in there too.

Is this a better book than The Plot? No, but it’s a different book: darker, more self-referential and definitely more shocking. It’s a sequel that not only justifies its existence, but feels absolutely necessary.

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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.