Book Review | Mystery Thriller

Published: October 30th , 1967
Gipsy’s Acre was a truly beautiful upland site with views out to sea – and in Michael Rogers it stirred a child-like fantasy. There, amongst the dark fir trees, he planned to build a house, find a girl and live happily ever after. Yet, as he left the village, a shadow of menace hung over the land. For this was the place where accidents happened. Perhaps Michael should have heeded the locals’ warnings: ‘There’s no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy’s Acre.’ Michael Rogers is a man who is about to learn the true meaning of the old saying ‘In my end is my beginning.’ The title Endless Night was taken from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence and describes Christie’s favourite theme in the novel: a “twisted” character, who always chooses evil over good. Christie finished Endless Night in six weeks, as opposed to the three-four months that most of her other novels took. Despite being in her seventies while writing it, she told an interviewer that being Michael, the twenty-something narrator, “wasn’t difficult. After all, you hear people like him talking all the time.” The book is dedicated to Christie's relative "Nora Prichard from whom I first heard the legend of Gipsy's Acre." Gipsy's Acre was a field on the Welsh moors. (Goodreads)
There’s something gripping about Agatha Christie’s writing. You find yourself holding your breath every single time, and Endless Night was no different.
This is a slow-burn thriller. Nothing truly happens even at the halfway mark, but you can sense something ominous lingering in the background. Then, the ending completely flips the script. It’s not easy to pull off a story like this. If you’ve read The Fury by Alex Michaelides, then you’ll know that this is what that book tried to do but didn’t quite manage to land.
Endless Night almost reads like a breezy story, if not for the ever-present shadow of danger that hangs over it. The narrative alone had me hooked until the very end.
As always, Agatha Christie delves deep into the human psyche and how it shapes our choices. She challenges us to break stereotypes about certain kinds of relationships while also questioning why those stereotypes exist in the first place.
This one’s an open-ended thriller. You can sense the danger ahead but never quite predict how it will unfold. Without giving too much away, what you can expect is an idyllic village setting, a young couple eager to build their dream home in a mansion that might be cursed, and the chain of events that follows.
As the story unravels, we see the world through the protagonist’s eyes. His impressions of the surrounding people, and how his emotions colour our view of them.
While I enjoyed the story overall, I did expect something a bit more sinister involving Ellie and her mysterious family. Instead, some of them fade out midway without adding much to the plot.
Overall, Endless Night is a poetic whirlwind of a thriller. The tension builds slowly and steadily for about 75% of the book before spiralling into sharp twists and turns toward the end.
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