I hit the epilogue and felt confused. Then I figured out what was going on

Review: Home Before Night, J. P. Pomare

J.P. Pomare – New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based – exploded onto the Australian thriller scene in 2018 with his award-winning debut Call Me Evie. He has published a book a year ever since, all of them bestsellers.  

Home Before Night (2023) is set as the third coronavirus wave hits. All inhabitants of Melbourne are given until 8pm to get home. Wherever they are then, they must stay for four weeks. When Lou's son, Samuel, doesn't arrive home by nightfall, she begins to panic.

He doesn't answer or text. His socials are inactive. Lou is out of her mind with worry, but she can't go to the police, because she has secrets of her own. Lou must find her son herself and bring him home.

Pomare’s become known for inventive premises and twists. So after enjoying his earlier book The Last Guests (soon to be adapted for Stan) I read this expecting a twist. 

Come it did – but I kept assuming there would be more, after which I might feel more satisfied by this story. Then I hit the word “Epilogue.” 

But I was only two-thirds through the book, I thought, confused. 

Then I saw that the last 33 per cent of the book was an extract of the author’s next novel. 

This is not an uncommon marketing technique but it is more usual to get a few pages of taster at the end of a full-size novel. 

This is already a relatively slender 282-page book containing a very unexpectedly slender 189-page novel. 

It doesn’t set you up to expect this on the front cover, only flags the inclusion of the extract at the bottom of the blurb on the back. And it is not described anywhere as a novella. It was first published as an Audible Original; I’m not sure whether that’s significant. 

But I wonder whether with this book, Hachette is showing us what it looks like when a “more is more” publishing ethos takes hold, rather than taking a little more time to ensure each book is the best it can be. 

Pomare publishing a book every year for six years after his first is an enormous achievement but I wonder – I don’t know, I just wonder – whether this has come at the expense of letting his work breathe, grow and develop. 

I also don’t know whether Pomare has felt or faced any pressure to publish at this rate. 

But I feel that the book’s seemingly abbreviated length explains my sense of dissatisfaction.  

The main character, Lou, clearly has severe flaws and challenges, but she is not particularly well fleshed out, and perhaps it was difficult to flesh her out any further, given how much of her backstory must be obfuscated to serve the plot. However, there might have been more ways to develop her in the present without giving away more of her backstory. Her son, Samuel, is barely developed as a character. The setting is cleverly used as a plot device, regulating characters’ movements and communication modes, but I felt there was another missed opportunity here to explore this rich setting and build the atmosphere of a city really suffering in repeated lockdowns. 

So, I felt detached from the whole thing, despite its breakneck pace, and indifferent to the drama of the climactic scenes. 

Home Before Night has an inventive premise, was easy to read, twisty, clever and pacy.  I just wanted more. 

This may partially be a genre thing. 

The parent genre, crime, frequently features well developed, believable, recurring central detective characters, strong senses of place, and valuable social portraiture. And corpses! 

By contrast, the subgenre of domestic thriller – psychological thrillers with a home or family setting – often have a standalone story and protagonist, often effectively a combination of hero but also potential villain, and are frequently unlikeable and unrelatable to a degree (I know it is problematic to evaluate characters based on likeability, but again, it’s genre fiction …) as their often-counterintuitive actions are not explained, made as they are in service of the plot. Elements illuminating crucial parts of their character are concealed until the appropriate moment – but sometimes by then I’ve stopped caring. 

Sometimes the rest of the book makes it worth it. Some of the domestic thrillers by Sophie Hannah, which have all the above negatives, rise above the rest with their playfulness, intelligence and humour. To be fair, Hannah has been publishing thrillers for nearly 20 years, not six, and there are works of hers I’ve felt as detached from as I did from Pomare’s.  

A book of any genre should be more than a clever plot; otherwise it’s just a puzzle written down. Perhaps Hachette encouraging this book to be fleshed out to a more traditional length for the genre could have addressed the issues that made me feel so unsatisfied. 

I would be curious to know whether any fellow thriller readers have noticed books coming out that they felt were padded with unusually long excerpts from the author’s next offering; perhaps it’s not as unusual as I thought. 

And Candice Fox, Michael Robotham and Christian White, very accomplished authors, loved this one, judging by their endorsements; maybe it’s just time for me to stop with the domestic thrillers and go back to good old-fashioned crime. You know where you are with a corpse.   

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