May – Elixir Book Nook – The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor

Last Month’s Book Read

The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor

Last month’s book read for our Elixir Book Nook consisted of “The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor.” The genre of this book is said to be Horror.

Now, I’m a huge fan of horror, so I was particularly excited about this book as some of the reviews stated that if you enjoyed Stephen King then this is for you.

Initial Impressions

My first thoughts as I started reading was that it was a bit of a slow read, then it started jumping back and forth through time. In general that throws me off anyways, so I didn’t really enjoy that part of the book. But it was nice that it wasn’t quick here and there, there were quite long chapters before it would flick back to the past.

I quite enjoyed the gory side of the waltzer literally ripping someone’s face off but hey, we all have our weird guilty pleasures. Anyhoo, that’s about as much as I enjoyed throughout this whole book.

Character Development & Plot

The characters really didn’t develop for me, Eddie was particularly boring with no life as he grew older. The twists and turns as they aged wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Yes one of their friends may have died, another may have lost the ability to walk but overall it’s like no one really got over the past, even though it was quite literally dead and buried.

Eddie’s weird obsession with his teacher was quite concerning, and then the fact that even though he knew that he didn’t kill the girl, he let them take the fall for it. All because his kleptomaniac ways could not stop himself from taking her ring the day he found her body.

Yeah to find out he found the body way before his friends did, used different coloured chalks that aligned with his friends to make them think someone else directed them there. Very dark, and twisted behaviour from a child of that age.

I mean the chalk man itself was not even a real thing, that disappointed me the most.

Reading Experience

As I was navigating through the book I questioned if this was going to be my first one and did not finish, as I genuinely struggled to keep reading. It took me 6 days overall to get it read which is not the usual for me with books.

Monthly Review Results

As always when we do our books we have a monthly review, this month we had a better turn out with 7 people turning up in boxes and 1 in the comments, the overall ratio of like to didn’t like was a 3:5.

A few of the ones that did like it, were those who at first didn’t want to read it as it was classed as a horror, but once they did they enjoyed it, as it was not as bad as they thought it was.

They quite enjoyed the twist of Eddie’s Room mate being related to one of his old best friends. That was definitely a shock for any of us.

It wasn’t a dig against the author at all, they have done some amazing work. But this one really didn’t tickle our fancy.

A few of us stated we thought Eddie was rather weird, even from the start as a child it’s like he gave off this aura of strangeness.

He got even more odd near the end of the book, the head really? That’s grim. I dread to think what he used it for during his teen and adult years.

Final Rating

So overall, if I was to rate this book out of 5 stars I would unfortunately only give it a 1. As I just felt like it wasn’t really horror, I needed more and it was just not given to me. I felt like I was reading an idea, not the book itself.

Anyways, we move along and hope that next month’s book is a better read for everyone. With next month being Pride Month, we ironically landed on an LGBTQ+ theme for next month’s read. Stay tuned for 30th June for our next review via @darkhearts98 on Tiktok!