Title: False Bodies

Author: J.R. McConvey

Release date: October 1st, 2024

*Huge thanks to Breakwater Books for sending me a digital ARC!*

Do you know the writer J.R. McConvey?

I feel like this is a name that not enough people know about, but that within a few short months that is going to really change.

First, let’s get something out of the way. I know J.R. McConvey. Cocky eh? Well, no, what I mean is, I actually know the guy, consider him to be a wonderful friend and at one point, we were even working on a screenplay for one of my novella’s together. J.R. is not only a fantastic human, but outside of the writing world, he’s a Gemini and Genie award-winning producer. In the writing world, his debut collection, ‘Different Beasts’ which was released in 2019 won the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize in Speculative Fiction award. And that was where we connected. Well, not through that – but because of that win – his collection was sent over to Kendall Reviews for reviewing and I jumped on it for three reasons. One – it was titled ‘Different Beasts’ so I was stoked to read some Canadian beastly tales. Two – because he was Canadian. I’m always game to read new to me Canuck stuff. Three – not surprising, but Andrew Pyper had judged those awards and there was a blurb from what Andrew had noted about the book, and that really sold me. It was very similar in tone to Andrew’s blurb of Ian Rogers ‘Every House is Haunted’ collection and that collection is SO GOOD, so I was on board. And guess what? ‘Different Beasts’ was magical.

Not long after, J.R. and I began chatting and since then we’ve become solid buds. But don’t take that for nothing, if this book sucked, I’d tell you, because I know his beard could handle the truth.

Sometime in the last two or three years, McConvey asked me if I knew of any place he should send this novel for submission. I suggested a few spots, but nothing stuck (unintentional pun), but when he said it had been picked up, I was so excited.

Why?

Have you read the blurb.

Here’s a quick sentence to get you excited. ‘A cryptozoologist goes to Newfoundland to investigate a report of a Kraken attack.’ I mean COME ON. If you read that and your eye brows went up and your heart rate quickened, then not only are you and I now friends, but you can best bet you’re zipping to the bottom to hit the preorder link.

If you read that and were like ‘meh,’ I suggest you stop reading and question why you hate awesome fiction. You can marinate on that.

So, now, we arrive at McConvey’s debut. ‘False Bodies.’ Stunning cover art in tow, I bumped this way up my TBR, wondering just what craziness McConvey’s delivered and boy, does he deliver.

What I liked: The story follows Eddie Gesner, a cryptozoologist, who is trying to live his life with a few things hanging over his head. The first is that he’s seven-feet tall. Which makes him standout no matter where he goes. I’m not sure if this character was modeled after James “Bobo” Fay from Finding Bigfoot, but that’s kind of who I pictured while reading this. The second is that many people consider him a murderer. Why? After marrying the woman of his dreams, they went on a trip in Tibet. While there, his wife disappeared, never to be found. She was super rich. So, many presumed he killed her. While Eddie insists that a Yeti took her. This has now given him the moniker Eddie ‘The Yeti’ Gesner, which he detests.

The story picks up while he’s at a cryptozoology conference. His friend contacts him and tells him of a strange occurrence off the Newfoundland coast. Where a drilling rig was seemingly attacked by a Kraken. How do they know this? A tentacle was left behind.

Up until this point, McConvey delivers a very straight forward creature-feature. He’s setting the stage and you’d be forgiven if you believed that the rest of the story would go like this – Eddie goes there, investigates, discovers that a massive squid exists, battles it to avenge the deaths of those workers and the death of his wife, and once he successfully kills the creature, lives out the rest of his life.

Wrong.

No, what McConvey does from that point on is simply extraordinary. This novel is richly layered and as we move from chapter to chapter – and it’s very subtle at first – J.R. ramps up the tension and the pacing so that the final quarter feels like a full on sprint.

Once on the ground, he teams up with a local detective who wants to get to the bottom of what happened. We get more details. The crew change was scheduled to happen. The new crew arrived, only to find nobody onboard the drilling rig. Then they all mysteriously returned – dead – but with markings on their foreheads.

We then get a mysterious diary – from the 1800’s and a distant relative of the detective – that goes over a previous incident of a giant squid arriving at the shores, and soon Eddie understands someone is following him.

The introduction of the squid-cult was a fascinating plot point. I won’t go too far into that aspect as I’m now at the stage where I gotta walk the spoiler-free line carefully, but it not only opened up some supernatural elements I wasn’t expecting, but made for some cinematic scenes.

Throughout, the reader is pulled along by one simple aspect – is there really a giant squid. Once we get our answer, McConvey ramps things up and this is when we get the ‘corporate greed’ aspect that we are tipped off about in the synopsis. Yet another element that honestly wasn’t on my Bingo card for this novel, it added more depth, but also worked well when we consider the current Canadian environment and the ongoing boycott of Loblaws. My only gripe is that the head of the corporation wasn’t described more like slime ball Galen Weston.

McConvey wraps this up perfectly. The final fifty pages or so are pristine and harken back to the depth of storytelling he offered in ‘Different Beasts.’ This is a Canadian story at its heart and that really shines through this final quarter. Throughout we get that aspect well, the ‘everyone knows everyone’-ness of the location, the ‘everyone is friendly’ aspects, but McConvey injects the Canadian horror story element ten-fold to wrap this up and it really showcases how phenomenal of a writer he is.

What I didn’t like: Honestly only one main issue with this one and that involves somebody key to the cult. I can’t specifically say – spoilers and such – but Eddie invites them to meet up as he has questions but somebody kills them before he can meet them. The way it was laid out, I felt like I’d missed something, as I’d kind of assumed they had special powers, so when it was said they died, I wasn’t fully on board with the delivery. Minor, but was an odd choice at that particular juncture of the story.

Why you should buy this: Look, if you read my one-liner up top and pumped your first in the air and instantly smelled saltwater, then smash the preorder button and celebrate being awesome.

But, if you read all of this and you’re still on the fence, you should buy this because this novel takes the basic outline of a horror novel and wraps it within a 70’s detective novel. This is what a ‘James Bond Meets The Kraken’ movie would look like if filmed by the guys who made ‘Se7en.’ This novel delivers in spades with great set pieces, tons of action and a deeply flawed main character that you want to root for, even as the evidence stacks up against him, time and time again.

McConvey has delivered an immaculate debut novel and I can’t wait to see this one breach the surface and shred readers when it gets released.

5/5