The Binding Song by Elodie Harper - Blog tour.

The binding song by Elodie Harper.

A chilling debut for fans of Mo Hayder and Sharon Bolton, THE BINDING SONG takes you on a trip to Halvergate Prison. If you're lucky, you'll get to leave...

Dr Janet Palmer is the new lead psychologist at HMP Halvergate in a remote, bleak area of Norfolk. At first, she was excited by the promotion. Then she starts to see how many secrets are hiding behind the high walls.

A string of inmates have committed suicide, leaving no reasons why, and her predecessor has disappeared - along with his notes. The staff are hostile, the threat of violence is ever-present, and there are rumors of an eyeless woman stalking the corridors, punishing the inmates for their sins.

Janet is determined to find out what is really going on. But the longer she stays and the deeper she digs, the more uncertain she feels.

Halvergate is haunted by something. But it may be a terror worse than ghosts...     

                                                            

✮ ✮ 

So to start I love how this book dives right in, right from the start you know what the story is about and what is going on and I love books that do that!

In places, this book is very intense, which for me made it very hard to put down I constantly wanted to read more to find out what was going on!

I like how the story is set in a prison, almost like there's no way out which gives the story a more intense feeling which again makes the book so much harder to put down!

This book definitely has the creep factor, it's set in a remote place, has ghosts and is dark so it's one of them books you want to read but with the lights on and snuggled under a duvet!

As well as just being a thriller about a prison that has an angry ghost after the inmates, this book also touches on mental health, religion and prison life itself, which is done fantastically it all ties in together and gives that added depth to the book, while some parts are quite shocking/uncomfortable I really do think it should be added to your to be read list! 

I love the style of writing for a first nook by Elodie Harper I cannot fault it, I love the pacing of the story, the detail, even the cover! You would never guess this is someone's debut, you would think they've been writing for years!

This is an amazing debut book and I honestly can not wait to read what comes next from Elodie Harper, which happens to be The death knock out 12th July!

(click the cover to pre-order now)

If you do get this book I hope you enjoy it and leave me a comment on what you thought!

My rating is: ✮ ✮ ✮ ✮ 

(4 stars)

Thank you for reading.

The binding song on Amazon for the Kindle version or paperback:

Author: Elodie Harper.

Publisher: Mulholland Books.

I would like to say a quick Thank you to Mulholland Books for letting me be part of this blog tour and please if you can go check out all the others on this tour, it will be worth it!

And to finish off here's a little bit extra about The Binding Song by Elodie Harper!

Thomas More in THE BINDING SONG

  

The first words in THE BINDING SONG belong to Janet Palmer’s favorite author Thomas More, and are a quotation from a book he wrote in prison while awaiting trial for treason:

“Our own wretched state … is but a wandering about for a while in this prison of the world, till we be brought unto the execution of death.”

More’s book is called A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (though that snippet sounds anything but comforting!)  He wrote it in the mid 1530s, as an imaginary conversation between a Hungarian man called Anthony and his nephew Vincent.  Their country is about to be invaded by a Turkish Army and as Christians, they will face persecution, even death. Anthony is trying to reassure Anthony that they will endure whatever they have to face. It’s a parable for the political situation More found himself in, awaiting trial and almost certain execution for refusing to accept Henry VIII as the head of the Church.

          Loss of liberty comes up frequently in the book; if for Shakespeare all the world’s a stage, for More, all the world’s a prison.  You shouldn’t fear prison, Anthony tells Vincent, because in a sense we are all already in prison.  God is the jailer, angels and demons are his ‘under-jailers’ and every human being is a prisoner, all under sentence of death.  It’s just we don’t know the time or manner of our execution.  We’re all imprisoned by our circumstances too, says More – there are limits on what we can do, where we can go; some people’s health may limit their life, others may be constrained by their state of mind, even their own character.

          In THE BINDING SONG I tried to re-imagine this landscape of More’s.  There’s the actual prison, based on my research into contemporary British institutions, with an added twist of Gothic.  HMP Halvergate rises out of the marshes, a nightmare vision in the fog, but it has its roots in reality, from the therapy sessions and drugs problems, to the fact it’s built on a former air field, like a number of real East Anglian jails.

         Then there’s grief and the aftermath of violence which lie at book’s heart, and form their own kind of prison.  We meet survivors and the families of criminals, all dealing with the fallout.  In the figure of the white visitor, the vengeful eye less woman who torments inmates in dreams and hallucinations, grief and rage have taken human shape – or, as her victim’s fear, perhaps we are meeting one of More’s under jailers, a demon.

        But as Janet Palmer, Halvergate’s psychologist and the book’s central character points out, belief in demons can be a sign of mental illness.  In my research, I spoke to psychologists and psychiatric nurses about their experiences of working inside.  The instances of mental illness in prison is much higher than the general population, and being cooped up all day, with little to distract you from your own thoughts, can be particularly difficult.  Add to this the current widespread availability of psychotropic legal highs in prison and you have a potent mix.

       The stories I was told far outdid the events in my own – I heard about a prison chaplain and psychologist who became convinced one of their inmates was possessed by the murder victim of another prisoner, and a chaplain told me about being asked to perform exorcisms on cells.  There are no limits to the tricks your own mind can play, and you are perhaps never as trapped by your delusions than in the closed environment of a prison; a fact Thomas More, waiting in his cell in the Tower, knew well.