I guess it’s fitting that I have a jumble of thoughts that I want to pen down about this book, but it’s all muddled up, and I find it hard to articulate adequately all I want to about reading this stupendous work. I want to say a lot of things at once and don’t know where to begin. Because that’s exactly how the book is. A man trapped in a closed island, isolated setting, with a society somewhat reminiscent of Agatha Christie novels (of whom the author is a fan and admits to being influenced by), has to unlock the mystery of the death of Evelyn Hardcastle, and he has 8 days and 8 characters to do so. If he fails, he remains in the loop, starting another 8 day cycle from zero and trying to figure out the murderer. He has been in the loop for years. The hosts he inhabit over each day wake up in different locations and at different times of the day and sometimes are incapacitated, and it’s hard to figure where the loop actually begins, so there is a time travel element as well in multiple cases. So it’s a meta time travel mystery novel and lives up to the billing of all the disparate genres it’s trying to emulate. 
Intricate plot with compelling characters who each possessed their own unique strengths and handicaps, (and contributed to solving the mystery which was the key to the freedom of Aiden, the trapped character) and the slow unwrapping of the events and their meanings and their connection to the murder was all pulled off pretty deftly in an ultimate masterclass in storytelling. And yet, the reason I ended up feeling that this work is a cut above in whatever genre it falls under was not just the complex plot and the hookability of the novel. It was also because of the depth of the questions explored by the characters, and the occasional dwelling on the ‘whys’ and ‘rights and wrongs’ of their actions. It gave each of the ‘hosts’ inhabited by Aiden a moral arc that also sometimes came in conflict with Aiden’s own nature. The ‘stubbornness’ of Aiden broke through and completed a perfect character arc in his case in the end. Some characters turn a completely new leaf, some don’t, some die. These moral musings are pretty neatly woven into the plot and just embellish the actions of multiple characters. 


Apart from this, his writing has some amazing lessons in character development/introduction/scene construction/plotting and a practical class on several such important aspects of writing. For example, talking of a character who had lost a son who was six years old, nineteen years ago has been described thus when another character meets him :

“Lit by the flames, it’s clear the years have taken more from him than they’ve given. Uncertainty is a crack through the center of him, undermining any suggestion of solidity or strength. This man’s been broken in two and put back together crooked, and if I had to guess, I’d say there was a child-shaped hole right in the middle.”

This was literary orgasm for me (subjective opinion of course). And then gems like

“He looks to be in his early fifties, though age has left him decadently rumpled rather than weary and worn.”

His writing is beautiful at the most basic level – the sentence, and every second sentence at that.At the end of the book, in a section called ‘A conversation with the author’ is a transcript of an interview and when posed the question of ‘What do you love most about writing?’, he replies with, 

“Everything. Every single thing. I love that first blank page, that perfect first line, the moment your character says something unexpected and you realize they are a proper character. I love when it takes over a part of your brain and sits there, like a puzzle you’re always working on, even while talking with friends or eating dinner with your wife. I love talking to people who’ve read my book and hearing their theories. I love beautiful writing, lines so good they bug you a week later. I love the collaborative spirit of editing and the joy of a good metaphor. Everything. Every moment. Wouldn’t change a thing”.

Replace wife with girlfriend and I resonated with everything he has said in that reply. It was exactly that and a lot of things when I was working on my novel too! A good writer is someone who elucidates on an observation that is seemingly obvious but hasn’t been uttered so eloquently before. This is exactly what he achieved through that reply. And my admiration grew, having felt that he has strived and done a great job in living up to the standards he set for himself. He basically walked the talk through ‘The 7 and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle’. I really enjoyed the novel and the fact that the author had a larger vision of what he aimed to create made the novel even more worthy of a solid five star read for me. Recommends it for people who are in the mood to entertain some gear churning in the cranium accompanied by some head scratching albeit with the velvet glove of Stuart Turton’s beautifully crafted sentences. 
Thank you Stuart Turton for this amazing work. 

Originally posted on my Goodreads page John A’s review of The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Do follow if you enjoyed the review.