Honeycomb

Let’s get the puns out of the way, shall we? This book is in no way sweet, far from it. I do believe it will generate buzz and yes, the hapless main characters do end up getting quite busy in their Big-Brother style week of captivity.

That taken care of – Honeycomb is a nifty thriller with a clever premise. Nasty multi-millionaire James Moshida is much better with dollar signs than signs of humanity. In tandem with a pharma giant, he has developed a pill they claim will be revolutionary. Nobody is told until the end what exactly is so life-changing about the thing.

To prove the product’s effectiveness, Moshida has engineered a Big Brother arrangement whereby six hapless souls will spend a week in the same house. Five will take a placebo and one will take the real miracle drug and the result with make pharmaceutical history. Like a firing squad where only one shooter has an actual bullet, these participants have no idea if they are taking the real McCoy.

Enter Amanda Pearson, not a million miles removed from Britney Spears. She is a young Londoner who several years back won the Searching for a Star tv programme. Still in her twenties, she is a washed out, one-album wonder, who has grappled with drug use and overspending.

Her manager, improbably named Bunny, convinces Amanda to join the Moshida experiment. Her roommates will be five other lost puppies who have all had minor fame at some point. Amanda’s housemates are Justin, Claude, Arthur and two women Sherry and Wish. All five are well past their prime and facing financial imperatives as they live out messy lives.

Participation in the experiment comes with a hefty fee which these half-dozen lab rats all welcome.

None of the participants knows where they are exactly in the UK (Amanda is blindfolded as she is driven to the location). All they know for sure is the house is well stocked with booze and food. Oh, and while they are locked in, they have the run of the house but only Amanda’s bedroom door locks.

Any wily reader will quickly guess on this is not some jolly frat or sorority-house adventure where water-bucket pranks and the occasional crafty fag break are the worst of the tenants’ peccadilloes. Tempers fray, allegiances form and break up, jealousies erupt and the tension has no where to escape from this sealed golden cage.

The one weird thing is that everyone seems to really like Amanda. While they squabble and fight among themselves the three men and the two other women want to be Amanda’s BFF. Flattered at first, our young songbird soon tires of the endless attention and occasional adulation. Caves’ writing is so strong we genuinely feel Amanda’s increasing anxiety and distaste for this bunch. They are a pretty unpleasant lot, onetime Y-list celebs still grasping long-ended glory days. They are petty and short-tempered and make each other’s lives even more difficult than it would be in a place you cannot leave.

Honeycomb is suitably claustrophobic and weird. Through short glimpses into their earlier lives, Caves gives us insight into the other five lab rats that helps us understand why they would participate in such an unsavoury experiment. The two women and three men are cleverly drawn and we feel both pity and revulsion when reading about them.

Most of the story unspools from Amanda’s point of view (though we also see some things from Moshida’s perspective). The creepy-crawlies attack the reader as messily as they do the young crooner and the sense of paranoia and loneliness permeates.

My one quibble is the denouement is a tad on the long side. It needs to be messy and chaotic to fit with the supposed tidiness of the experiment set-up.

But that is a small complaint about a book that is otherwise scary and prescient and modern. Honeycomb addresses such issues as the power of mega-corporations, the cost of instant fame and our obsession with happy pills and quick solutions.

I have not read any of his other books but very much look forward to so doing.