Whistle by Linwood Barclay
William Morrow (May 2025)
Reviewed by W.D. Gagliani
After a long list of successful conventional thrillers (Bad Move, I Will Ruin You, Take Your Breath Away, etc.), author Linwood Barclay makes a welcome first foray into well-marked Stephen King territory with Whistle, a tour de force horror novel liberally dabbed with Ray Bradbury’s kind of evocative small-town dark fantasy.
Successful children’s book author Annie Blunt seeks a new start after a year in which one of her characters inspired a young reader to a tragic death and a hit-and-run killed her beloved husband. Fleeing Manhattan for the summer with her seven-year-old son, Charlie, Annie settles into a rambling upstate country house arranged for her by long-time editor Fin. From the start, strange occurrences plague Annie and Charlie, among them the sound of a train on a nearby discontinued rail line. Add to the list their nearest neighbors across the street — elderly Daniel and Dolores (who hasn’t been “right” since something happened to her in the house Annie’s now renting) — and an old toy train Charlie finds in a box inside a locked shed.
Tortured by guilt over how her bestselling Pierce the Penguin character had caused the tragedy, Annie’s not sure she’ll ever write again, but her optimistic editor has stocked a writing “studio” for her in the house, and soon she’s sharing the creative space with Charlie and his new (old) toy train. Accustomed to drawing her own characters, she’s shocked by her first new creation, a trenchcoated-wearing, man-shaped rat-wolf awakening her memory of a long-past eerie encounter. Meanwhile, Charlie’s frightening tendency to sleepwalk — induced by the trauma of his dad’s death — is rekindled instead of vanquished by their new surroundings. Annie’s attempts to make their new world safe spiral out of control.
In a parallel story set in the past, shortly after the September 11 attacks, the nearby tiny town of Lucknow, Vermont, is further unnerved by the disappearance of two men, and typically earnest police chief Harry Cook is feeling the pressure — is he capable of doing his job? When one of the missing is found horrifically deboned like a chicken, Harry’s faced with the daunting prospect of ferreting out a serial killer. Then a third man — the town’s harmless, recently down-on-his-luck drunk — goes missing, and Harry finds reason to suspect that the garrulous Mr. Nabler, owner of Mr. Choo Choo’s toy train store, may not be what he seems. And nobody seems to remember just when they noticed the shop’s presence. Indeed, soon he notes a pattern in which toy trains may just figure in “bad things” happening to good people.
What happened to Lucknow after the fall of 2001 now, in the present, affects Annie and her son, whose obsession with both the old train set and the bicycle she bought for him will lead them to a ghost town, and an encounter with the ancient evil that awaits. The reason is a genuine surprise.
Annie and Harry share the best of protagonists’ qualities by managing to be both engaging and convincing in their responses to the horrors that confront them. Barclay juggles their two timelines with ease, building suspense as Annie’s story and Harry’s inexorably entwine around the dubiously goofy figure of train huckster Edwin Nabler, Mr. Choo Choo himself. Despite a minor timing glitch relating to the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (the kind of error anyone who plays in the past is liable to make), the story’s forward motion chugs along (shall we say) to a satisfyingly eerie climax.
Whistle is not fast-and-furious, modern-style graphic horror, but rather what the youngsters might term a slow burn… which isn’t at all a flaw. I clearly remember that my first encounter with a newcomer named King, back in my high school days, was also a slow burn until about page 80, after which ’Salem’s Lot burned plenty hot, making me a fan for life. Barclay similarly deploys touches of the gruesome strategically to jolt the reader.
But along with openly referencing Bradbury’s dark tales, one might also be reminded of both Charles Grant’s “quiet” horror and Dean Koontz’s early work, all of which indicates that Linwood Barclay’s own tendencies lie in exploring the inexplicably sinister aspects of the smell of burning leaves, the sound of distant train whistles, and the screech of a locomotive’s four-six-two wheels skimming along the iron rails as they fuel the kind of delicious fright of which nightmares are made. Recommended for readers who’ve not already been jaded by today’s tendency to overemphasize the grotesque… and who appreciate that sometimes less is indeed more…Whistle may not break new ground but clearly signals Barclay’s intention to explore the darker side of his imagination.
