Source: Review copy from the publisher, Influx Press for the Random Things blog tour – thank you.
As thrillers go, I’m very fond of gangland novels, and within that crime thriller sub-genre is a sub-sub-genre of ‘hide out’ tales – be it enforced or by going AWOL. I’m thinking of novels like the rather excellent debut from Trevor Mark Thomas, The Bothy here, and you can add in the brilliantly sweary and darkly hilarious film In Bruges.
Paradise is one such, but it’s done with a difference. An operative in a mysterious organisation is driven to a remote cottage in the middle of a forest where they are told they must wait, until the powers that be have investigated the incident. They must stay within the forest boundaries, they’ll know if he tries to go further. Owen will bring supplies. He could be there for some time. It begins:
As he waited for them to come, wondering if they would kill him or not, Nash could not rid himself of the growing conviction that it was all a terrible mistake..
If they did intend to kill him, what could he do? He had no weapon. If he somehow managed to elude them, they would find him. He told himself it was best to wait and hope that common sense would prevail. Even so, he could not rid himself of the feeling that what had happened was a disaster, a catastrophe.
The man he only knows as Gray arrives, with Mr Black, and he is ordered to pack a bag with some warm clothes. They drive him who knows where, ending up at a cottage named Paradise in the forest. It’s clean but a bit decrepit, there’s no heating and it’s getting wintry – he’ll have to chop wood for the stove. With zero reception, he’ll have to entertain himself. They remind him of the rules and leave. First night, Nash can’t sleep, the noises of the forest are alien to this city boy, not forgetting the trouble he’s in.
It is a cacophony. All the terrifying things of the woods: spiders, snakes, armies of ants, bristling beetles and millipedes, clouds of flies, leathery bats and oily crows, weasels, wolves, ghosts, scorpions. His imagination runs riot. Murdered by witches, fiends, demons, Lost, abandoned. Alone.
This all adds a layer of creepy folk horror to the air of mystery right from the start. Day two, he sets about chopping wood, when a woman on a horse arrives. She introduces herself as Mary (Owen). She’s friendly, accepting a cuppa, but doesn’t give anything away. She’ll be back.
Left to himself, Nash has far much time to think about what happened, and the next chapter takes us back to his recruitment by Gray to an organisation shrouded in mystery. Although not a violent man, Nash had been recruited after Gray saw him react to instinctively lay out an attacker who set upon him in the bogs of a pub. It was a case of mistaken identity, but Gray saw how useful he could be and made him an offer of working for him. “You have a capacity for… action, but it’s well hidden. … It’s all below the surface.” he said.
Nash had been drifting, doing temporary night shift warehouse jobs, sharing a squalid house with several others. This seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. So he said yes to Gray, who gave him some cash to get a suit. He is introduced to Browne, who will be his partner – and begins his life of dropping things off, picking things or people up, and yes, leaning on people, with the threat of violence if needed. Nash is ever curious about the organisation he’s now working for, but Browne shuts all such queries down. Nash doesn’t like the leaning on people part of their job one bit. You know it’ll all go badly wrong when what seemed like a well-planned collection ends in a gunfight, leading to Nash’s isolation at Paradise.
At the cottage he looks forward to Mary’s visits. However, he gains another visitor, Mary’s teenaged daughter Brigid, there unknown to her mother. She is a child totally at home in nature – Nash’s complete opposite, she’s been watching Nash as he explores the forest. The pair strike up a friendship and she teaches him about nature in their environment, and he starts to feel more in tune with his surroundings and we are immersed in their world, especially as spring is nearly sprung.
But we know it can’t last and I shall say no more!
Once ensconced within the forest, there’s always a dread feel behind whatever’s happening, in that Gray and his men could turn up at any time to execute summary justice, so the suspense is telling. Then there’s the force of Mother Nature coming through with Nash’s interactions with Brigid and his exploration of the forest. Nash never really fully bonded with the dark side, so he’s a very believable and sympathetic not-quite-anti-hero. We want him to survive. Mary and Brigid are great characters too. It’s the slippery Gray that is hard to get a handle on – who does he really work for? But that’s deliberate on Tufnell’s part. Once Nash is getting to grips with his environment, the creepiness of the situation dials down, only to creep back up as the climax beckons.
Tufnell’s writing is so engaging, and I loved the elements of folklore used alongside the elemental force of nature that gives the narrative a life of its own. It is quite a serious novel, despite Tufnell having some Tarantinto-esque fun with the established gang members’ names and Gray’s exaggeratedly polite way of being nasty, but it is not without a wryness behind Nash’s understanding of his predicament.
I enjoyed Paradise hugely, and will definitely seek out Tufnell’s first novel The North Shore, and whatever he writes next.
Paradise by Ben Tufnell. Influx Press, March 2026. Paperback original, 325 pages. BUY at Waterstones or Amazon via my affiliate links.
I do like the technique of slipping back in time to get the backstory after throwing us in medias res at the start; and what a concept to keep us guessing!
It worked really well here, and the suspense was built up brilliantly. And what was so pleasantly surprising was the mother nature sticking her tentacles in and the transformation in Nash to feel more at one with his environment (which then gave him an advantage of course).