Is, for a change, a genuinely good book by Steve Harris. No, not the one from Iron Maiden, but the other one. The one from Basingstoke who wrote Adventureland.
It was his third novel, and after Adventureland (aka: The Haunted Funfair Comes to Town) in 1990 and Wulf (aka: Entire village gets Mad Cow Disease and enters into shared hallucination that outsiders are all werewolves), The Hoodoo Man was, in many ways, somewhat different. And it remains possibly his best novel of all time, frankly. I'm actually surprised more people didn't read Steve Harris stuff back in the 90s, which is a shame because it sold enough to stay in print during the 1990s but not really thereafter, and I'm informed that he died in 2016 of dementia.
Executive Summary
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
A bit more detail, if you wouldn't mind?
Okay. Well. The book starts in a London council house in the late 1950s, and 5 year old Danny Stafford is playing with his older brother in the back yard, and his older brother has an old WW2-era rifle and they're pretending to be good guys and Nazis. As you do. Unfortunately, older brother starts taking it a bit too seriously and starts threatening to shoot their mother. Who says something highly ill-advised to defuse the situation. Specifically, "Don't shoot me, shoot Danny!"
Older brother obliges.
Danny Stafford survives, and undergoes mind-bendingly complex brain surgery to remove the bullet from his brain. Against all odds, it works, although there's a fragment of bone lodged in his pineal gland. But it doesn't appear to be doing him any harm, so it's left there.
The family then move to Basingstoke and Danny grows up. We're treated to a litany of various incidents from teenager- and adulthood about how he develops an interest in electronics and uses that skill to cock-block his older brother (who, having shot him as a small child, now bullies him relentlessly about his nerdiness), about how he runs into - literally - a girl named Suzy at the local library who he takes up with and eventually builds a life with, how he ends up riding the "white heat of technology" in the 1970s, and then, with a slight reference to a maniac kidnapping children at funfairs in 1990 (which is the plot of Steve Harris's earlier book Adventureland), it's 1992. The present day. And Danny is re-tiling the bathroom in the house he lives in with Suzy in Basingstoke when he blacks out and has weird hallucinations about seeing a huge car accident on the outskirts of Basingstoke in which an inattentive trucker, too busy grooving out to James Brown in his cab, fails to notice his brakes have failed and that his tanker truck careers into a car containing a young family killing all of them. In the vision, which he appears to be able to walk around him, he realises that he is seeing next day and what will actually happen. Suzy is of course worried about him and he tells her the story of how his brother shot him and the bone shard injury to his brain, but he does something that he really, really, shouldn't.
He goes out to get a paper, but actually goes to the road junction where the accident takes place and tries to stop it. He realises that the young couple in the car must have pulled over at a certain layby and tries to annoy them enough to keep them from setting off again until the out of control tanker truck is out the way. He does this by very awkwardly telling them that the big truck coming the other way that they can see is going to come out of control and cause a huge accident because of failed brakes, and risks a physical alteration when the truck comes and goes without crashing, because in keeping the young family off the road he's changed the future just enough to avoid it. Unfortunately this, and another incident a few days later where he has a vision of a massive plane disaster in Athens and inadvertently reveals to Suzy that he knew about it in advance, causes him to have to admit to her that he can see the future, the whole story of how his brother shot him, and how he thinks this is connected.
Danny's life then spirals downwards as a result of this. He keeps having blackouts and visions at work, and gets hauled over the coals by his boss for it, and loses it with said boss and tells him to jam said job up his arse and is thus fired. He tries to find other jobs but struggles, goes to a seance in the back of a pub and has a massive fit-cum-blackout because of the spiritual energy involved therein, has a huge row with Suzy that results in her going to stay with her sister, and then just to add to the fun, while he's home one afternoon a gentleman called Alistair Lerner who was at the seance and realises that he's a real precognitor (because Alistair is one himself) tries to explain to him how all this seeing the future works, and how it is a talent that must be used, or he, Danny, will likely die of a huge stroke or aneurysm. Danny, of course, just wants to be normal and completely loses his rag with Alistair and tells him to FRO.
Bad move. Danny then starts having visions of a dark figure in a Gannex raincoat who knows all about Danny including the personal and even intimate details of his life, and who gloats that he is going to possess him, and at the same time, visions of an armed blag of a security van going to the big Eli Lilly plant on the outskirts of Basingstoke (this being 1992 it should be explained that a lot of workers in the UK back then got paid in cash and security van robberies were a common activity for London Gangsters) which will be witnessed by a young mother and child, and that the robbers will kill them both to leave no witnesses. He then has another vision that if he tips of the Police, the robbers will know he did it and extract a grisly and ultra-violent revenge on Suzy involving the use of a broken Coke bottle.
Needless to say, it gets worse still. That figure in the Gannex raincoat? That's Danny himself, and it turns out in all his futures, Danny will become a serial killer or possessed by one.
Amazingly, it does manage to have a happy ending. I'll not spoil it for you, but it is so because Danny finally manages to locate his spine, and stop running away from his problems, and understand that being a Hoodoo Man is only a bad thing if you let it. The characters are generally pretty nicely drawn. Danny himself goes from being the sort of person who things happen to to the sort of person who makes things happen and takes agency. A lot of the writing is clearly done with an eye for the absurd and Steve Harris's prose is full of bons mots and the same sort of slightly world-weary yet mocking tone as ever about the dark side of provincial and suburban British life. Unlike his previous novels, which were very much Stephen King like "it was a fine day and then evil came," the evil in The Hoodoo Man is borne out mostly as a result of cowardice. Danny keeps making the wrong decisions because he just wants an easy life, which comes back to bite him and others all the time. When he slings Alistair Lerner out his house, he never wanted any of it. He never admitted to Suzy that he has blackouts and can see the future because he doesn't want her to think he's a fantasist and lose respect for him - and then he lies to her about it and such things and she loses trust in him in any event, and then possibly loses her forever after he tries and fails to play both sides of fate in the armed robbery situation. He even is at one point mentioned as staying in a job he hates because it pays fairly well and doesn't require too much intellectual bandwidth, even though he admits he should be doing more. It takes being lost and alone and living in Alistair Lerner's shop front in Brighton before he finally decides to take a stand. But when he does, the way in which he manages to extract himself is utterly glorious, and fittingly enough, he has one final vision of himself finally getting married to Suzy even though it is years in the future. (And yes, both Danny and Suzy appear in one of Steve Harris's later novels, the same way that the events of Adventureland are mentioned here.)
If you have ever lived in a provincial British town, I recommend it. As Alan Garner said, it's easy to have supernatural things in fantasy, but if you can convince your readers that the monsters are real and living with you, that's a lot more impactful.
I recommend you read it. It may take a bit of digging but I believe Amazon has some used copies for sale semi-regularly.
(IN24/20)