Deity by Matt Wesolowski

The Dark Prince of Northumbrian Noir (so crowned by Karen Sullivan) is back! One of my most anticipated reads for this year, Deity by Matt Wesolowski is out next Thursday and I'm delighted to share my review today. Huge thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part in the blog tour and to the publisher for my review copy. I have since pre-ordered my own print copy.

The Blurb:

When pop megastar Zach Crystal dies in a fire at his remote mansion, his mysterious demise rips open the bitter divide between those who adored his music and his endless charity work, and those who viewed him as a despicable predator, who manipulated and abused young and vulnerable girls.

Online journalist, Scott King, whose ‘Six Stories’ podcasts have become an internet sensation, investigates the accusations of sexual abuse and murder that were levelled at Crystal before he died. But as Scott begins to ask questions and rakes over old graves, some startling inconsistencies emerge. Was the fire at Crystal’s remote home really an accident? Why was he never officially charged? Are reports of a haunting really true?

Dark, chillingly topical and deeply thought-provoking, Deity is both an explosive, spine-chilling thriller and a startling look at how heroes can fall from grace and why we are willing to turn a blind eye to even the most heinous of crimes…

My Review:

Deity is the fifth book in the brilliant Six Stories series following Six Stories, Hydra, Changeling and Beast.  If you haven't discovered these books yet, go and find them now, you won't regret it. 

Six Stories is a true crime podcast hosted by Scott King. For each podcast series (book) he speaks to six people with some connection to an unsolved crime or mysterious death. So people connected to the victim, the alleged perpetrator or maybe the scene of the crime. This way he allows his listeners to draw their own conclusions. Oh, and there's a sinister otherworldly thread running through each podcast series. In Deity, King's podcast run is about the recently deceased rock god Zach Crystal, who was adored worldwide and did endless charity work. But there were detractors too, and five women have come forward claiming to have been sexually abused by Crystal. King hears from both camps. And there is plenty of mystery about Crystal's death, and where he went on his 'time out', when he disappeared from public view for a year before returning with new music and a planned world tour shortly before the fire that took his life. 

Deity, like the others in the series, is presented as a podcast series with six episodes each preceded by an extract from a piece of media, in this case Crystal's triumphant TV interview after his year away. Then we 'hear' King's voice and those of his interviewees. I have said before that I find reading Matt's books a totally immersive experience and it was no different for Deity. The places he creates are so real - Colliecrith Forest in the Highlands sounds scary but beautiful. The same with the characters - although I'm reading the written word it feels like I am listening to Scott's podcasts - I can hear the voices of the contributors, in some cases build pictures of them in my head. The dialogue, as written by Wesolowski, feels completely natural - we hear the trip ups, the hesitations that we all experience when we're thinking on our feet, composing the answer to a question as we go. And they are such a varied collection of interviewees - the mother estranged from her Crystal crazy daughter was heartbreaking and I loved Craig Kerr from the Colliecrith Estate. Was especially impressed with the correct use of the Scottish word 'rammy'! 

One voice we don't hear, other than in the TV interview snippets, is that of Zach Crystal, but his presence looms large over the whole thing. His character is, in turn, torn apart and built up during the course of the book, and it was hard to know what to think. In my head, he's a better looking Justin Hawkins from The Darkness (I'm SO sorry, Matt!) with an added ethereal quality. Whatever he has, girls go crazy for him. He has achieved cult status. And those that dare to speak up against him are hounded, vilified. The language used is bang up to date and generated a great discussion with my teenagers about the origin of the term 'stan' and the whole notion of doxxing. 

As with all Wesolowski's books Deity has a dark side.The story opens with two terrified girls lost in a forest in the middle of the night, convinced that someone, or something, is after them. It's one of those passages when I forgot to breathe. Then there are the awful accusations that Crystal abused teenage girls, his fans. And, finally, the Frithghast - the ghostly, part skeletal, part rotting, stag that Crystal claims to see just before something bad happens. And he's not the only one - some of his fans have seen it too... 

Wesolowski has once again successfully woven folklore in with an entirely current and relevant storyline. Deity is beautifully written, full of exquisitely crafted characters,  tense, dark, imaginative and immersive. Wesolowski shows us once again that the real monsters aren't the ones of legend. In a sad case of real life imitating art, the day after I finished reading this, singer Marilyn Manson was publicly accused of grooming and sexual abuse by Evan Rachel Wood and four other women... 

I love Matt Wesolowski's work, it's just brilliant. And fresh. And deliciously dark. I'm already looking forward to whatever comes next. 

The Author:

Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care. Matt started his writing career in horror, and his short horror fiction has been published in numerous UK and US based anthologies, such as Midnight Movie Creature, Selfies from the End of the World, Cold Iron and many more. His novella, The Black Land, a horror set on the Northumberland coast, was published in 2013. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at the Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an Amazon bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick, and film rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio. A prequel, Hydra, was published in 2018 and became an international bestseller. Changeling, the third book in the series, was published in 2019 and was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. His fourth book, Beast, won the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Independent Voice Book of the Year award in 2020.