Normal by Graeme Cameron Review

**SPOILERS**

Published: 2015 by Harlequin MIRA

"He lives in your community, in a nice house with a well-tended garden. He shops in your grocery store, bumping shoulders with you and apologizing with a smile. He drives beside you on the highway, politely waving you into the lane ahead of him. 

What you don't know is that he has an elaborate cage built into a secret basement under his garage. And the food that he's carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman he's holding there against her will—one in a string of many, unaware of the fate that awaits her."

This book seems to be anything from "Normal", I have to admit it really was nothing like what I was expecting (see below), the cover suggests a book full of crime and mystery with an unexpected twist at the end but it seems almost like a romance. In all honesty I much preferred this to what I was expecting.

Unknown, as we never once discovered the name of the main character is a serial killer with a cage in his basement. I rarely read books written in first person as I find that over time they can confuse me or just get boring but somehow this book kept me hooked throughout. Last night I was up till 3 o'clock in the morning with my nose in this book because I literally couldn't put it down, this is the first time in a while I've read a book that has woken me up more as the night progressed instead of making me fall asleep. The paragraphs I found were snappy and didn't talk a great deal into unnecessary information.

The most interesting character I found was not Unknown, but Erica... Her character developed, I think most throughout the whole book but not in the way that a lot of people talk about character development. Micky Smith from the Doctor Who reboots had a positive character development between season 1 and season 4, Erica most certainly didn't although it was extremely interesting psychologically. Not to say I didn't find Unknown's character very interesting, the psychopathic inability to understand emotional feelings was very well portrayed in how this book was written, including quite a deep connection to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs [1], which is suggested that psychopaths would only ever need to reach the first two stages which are Physiological needs and safety needs. This is shown quite plainly that Unknown hasn't reached the third stage, Love and belonging in the quote, "It doesn't depress me that I don't get birthday presents. I've got all the material things I want." [p.147] But to continue the quote, "Although I'd maybe like to have received a card, just to show that someone, somewhere was thinking about me", it can be noticed that the quote is about in the middle of the book cause this clearly shows that the stages he had originally hit (stages one and two) had began to progress to Love and belonging, stage three.

To sum up in three words: fantastic, chilling, abnormal

Any book that I can't put down till 3 o'clock in the morning deserves high praise from me.

5/5

Would highly recommend, warning contains strong language and sexual stuff...

xx