A dark, riveting thriller set in 1920s Hollywood about “the greatest horror movie ever made”, the curse said to surround it, and a deadly search, decades later, for the single copy rumoured still to exist.
1927: Hollywood studio fixer Mary Rourke is called to the palatial home of “the most desirable woman in the world”, silent movie actress Norma Carlton, star of The Devil’s Playground. When Rourke finds Carlton dead, she wonders if the dark rumours she’s heard are true: that The Devil’s Playground really is a cursed production. But nothing in Hollywood is ever what it seems, and cynical fixer Rourke, more used to covering up the truth for studio bosses, finds herself seeking it out.
1967: Paul Conway, film historian and fervid silent movie aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumour: that a single copy of The Devil’s Playground-a Holy Grail for film buffs that was supposedly cursed and lost to time-may exist. His search takes him deep into the Mojave Desert, to an isolated hotel that hasn’t changed in forty years but harbours only one occupant-and a shocking secret.
Separated by decades, both Rourke and Conway begin to suspect that the real Devil’s Playground is in fact Hollywood itself.

IN A NUTSHELL
Large sections of this book captured my imagination. Some of the visuals were stunningly good. The action scenes were vividly described. There was a strong sense of time and place. The plot put its claws in my curiosity and dragged me forward. For the most part, I was entertained. Sadly, it pushed the “no one in Hollywood is who they seem to be” theme too far. The plot twists started to feel like mischievous tricks the author was playing on the reader. The penultimate big reveal called the whole plot into question. The ending was deeply disappointing. It made sense in a “see how clever I am” way, but left me feeling that, at the end of the magic show, the magician showed me an empty top hat when they’d led me to expect a rabbit.

My wife and I listened to twelve hours of ‘The Devil’s Playground‘ audiobook over a few evenings. For the most part, it kept us entertained. Unfortunately, the ending was so disappointing that I was left questioning whether the book had been worth the time we’d spent on it.

The book had many strengths. It kept our curiosity actively engaged, speculating on how the three timelines of the story would be brought together. Many of the scenes were compelling, with tense action and spectacular visuals. The characters were easy to believe in and to dislike. The dialogue in the 1920s timeline was very well done. 

The story was told across three timelines: 1907 in Louisiana, 1927 in Hollywood and 1967 at Sudden Lake, plus one scene set in Kansas in 1897. I admired how well Craig Russell evoked the time and place, especially the sinister threat, superstition and barely suppressed violence of the Louisiana swamp, and the taken-for-granted decadence and corruption of 1920s Hollywood.

The plot was intricate, with important but concealed connections across the three timelines that are sometimes disclosed slowly, allowing the reader to join the dots and sometimes revealed with dramatic flourishes. The plot was propulsive and invited the reader to speculate on how the tuinelines and the people in them are connected.

Some of the writing was beautiful and powerful. The scenes of death in the bayou and of mass destruction on a Hollywood film set were vivid and cinematic. 

The Devil’s Playground of the title has multiple meanings: it’s the name of the silent movie that the plot pivots around, it’s a satirical reference to the degeneracy of Hollywood, and it’s a suggestion that evil is at play in the world as a whole. 

One of the strongest themes in the book was that no one in Hollywood is who they seem to be. Hidden identities are central to the plot. The disclosure of identities provides frequent (in my view, too frequent) plot twists. The use of hidden identities goes a little deeper. It points to a corruption at the heart of Hollywood that arose from enabling people to ‘resurrect’ themselves, letting them leave their past behind and construct a more perfect fictional version of themselves. These fictional identities, worn like expensive costumes, are protected and laundered by the studios, creating an environment where actions have no consequences and the boundary between reality and duplicity erodes. 

The second theme of the story is the existence of pure, self-assured, ruthless, predatory evil. Much of the plot revolves around people’s inability to see the evil for what it is until they can no longer escape from it. I found this part of the book to be the least convincing. I believed in it when I saw it emerge as a response to violence in the swamp, but I struggled to believe in it sustaining its intensity over sixty years.

Overall, ‘The Devil’s Playground‘ disappointed me. I felt it had great potential, but it overreached itself and failed to deliver. 

Some of the writing was exceptionally good. Some of it didn’t work. The text at the start of the novel felt over-stuffed with adjectives. There was an annoying amount of repetition of phrases and information. The pacing felt off. The writing felt heavy and slow. Things picked up as soon as the action moved to Louisiana, but that just made me aware of how much better the start of the book could have been.

The ending of the book was the part that disappointed me most. It wasn’t just anticlimactic. It seemed smugly contrarian. The ending was well written and made sense, but was deeply unsatisfying.

I enjoyed Kirsten Potter’s narration of ‘The Devil’s Playground‘. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.