Igor Lesev – “23”

Contrary to advertising, the horror novel “23” is not the first horror story in Russian. We can at least recall the novels of Ilya Masodov, which were published several years ago. But unlike his predecessors, debutant Igor Lesev brought his text as close as possible to the standards of popular reading, without going beyond the scope of “smart” literature.

The plot of this book - just like in the “ice” trilogy of Vladimir Sorokin and in “The Librarian” by Mikhail Elizarov - is only the tip of the iceberg, the underwater part of which is formed by an extremely unique magical practice. Everything that happens can be explained only if you know its rules. In the early 1920s, the daughter of a mad Tuvan poet, shunned by his fellow tribesmen because of his dark poetry, died along with his entire family during a bandit attack. Only the poet remained alive, who did not bury his daughter for a long time. As a result, a terrible magical mechanism was triggered, leading to the appearance of a gula - a person whose soul lives in someone else's, borrowed body. If the deceased is not buried on time and instead of burial, special rituals are performed on him, then his soul can enter someone else’s body and thus continue earthly life. Among the necessary rituals are the murder of four children and the recitation of special poems, one of which must be read by the victim of the magicians, that is, the one whose body is chosen as a new haven for the ghulu.

Having begun a long journey through different bodies, the former Tuvan girl becomes a witch and gives birth to new Gulus. The results of its activities are unexpectedly discovered in places where no one could even imagine anything like it. A nice guy, Vitya, who watches Ukrainian everyday life in the 2000s without delight and works as an assistant to a people's deputy in Kyiv, suddenly begins to receive strange signs. Incomprehensible calls, ominous dreams and old women with zinc buckets are far from the worst things he will have to face. The worst thing is that he constantly meets a woman in a red dress. One day Vita manages to see that she has no eyes. Victor soon realizes that his former classmate Dima Obukhov, who once bullied him at school, is seeking to take over his body. However, Obukhov is already living in someone else’s body, which belongs to Victor’s friend Igor. Vitya's life turns into a grueling flight in half with a crazy game according to the rules of Gulu. The number of corpses around the fugitive increases at an ever-increasing speed. The key role in the whole story is played by the name of Victor, who actually has a different name, the prophetic verses that haunt the heroes and the omnipresent number 23: Vitya must die on April 23, Easter. But even more terrible than death is the answer to the question of who the woman in red is.

28-year-old Kiev resident Lesev has access to something without which such stories remain as dead as their heroes who were not buried in time. The debutant frames the horror as a completely realistic text, imbuing it with a rich subject matter texture, meticulously recreating a recognizable living space, reviving memories of perestroika childhood. Lesev’s special collective character is modern Ukraine, with its rudely cheerful bilingualism and luxurious Soviet-South European neglect, observed in the small towns where the action moves from Kyiv. “23” is an absolutely soil-based horror: the habitat of the local monsters is Kyiv gateways, cramped dorm rooms, inhospitable courtyards of private buildings. Lesev wonderfully solved the theme of the text within the text, without which not a single mystery novel in the West can do: the clumsy pioneer poems of the witch, predicting trouble and published in the newspaper "Tribune of Labor" - the most adequate answer to the Pamuk and Pavich, in whose footsteps some Russian lovers of Mayan songs follow. manuscripts. And, undoubtedly, Lesev knows a lot about fear, forcing us to remember once again that scaring the reader is as worthy a craft as making them laugh or convincing. It is a pity that the author sometimes writes rather tongue-tied, and does so unintentionally. By the middle of the text, Lesev’s beloved expression “at least” manages to become such an eyesore that you begin to yearn for the extreme measures that the editor should have taken. Of course, many write much more sloppily, but it is especially offensive to see a stylistic defect in a good book.