Alligator: A Novel Horror Book Review

Lisa Moore’s wickedly fresh first novel—a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year—moves with the swiftness of an alligator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters mingling in contemporary St. John’s, Newfoundland. St. John’s is a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Colleen is a seventeen-year-old would-be ecoterrorist, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. Her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly’s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters. Alligator is a remarkable book, a suspenseful, heartfelt, and sexy story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us.