Family Business

4.5 stars, rounded to 5

In ‘Family Business’, Jonathan Sims ties gruesome and genuinely chilling horror with themes of grief and memory, in a novel which I absolutely devoured. I finished my copy of this in a day, and went back to restart it the next day.

‘Family Business’ follows Diya Burman at her new job as a cleaner, cleaning up after the recently deceased. This new job comes not long after the death of Diya’s roommate, Angie, and Diya has to manage her grief with the unusual (and often quite creepy) aspects of her job at Slough & Sons. Things soon take a turn for the horrific, but I’m not going to explain that here. Pick up the book and find out!

The way Sims writes is not only easy but enjoyable and engaging to read. The style of narration led me to keep questioning the nature of the plot, what might happen next, or what could have happened in the past that is being hidden. It is the book equivalent of seeing something in the corner of your room, in the dark, and not being quite sure whether it’s a pile of clothes or a man with a particularly sharp smile. It stayed in my head long after I turned away from it, and every instinct in my brain was screaming to ‘pick the book up again! What if that last chapter was a red herring? What if that last plot point reveals the ending?’

The characters are not only lovable but realistic, each with properly fleshed out traits and characteristics that made them as vivid as real people. The representation of LGBTQ+ people was also particularly nice to see in this book: it’s refreshing to consume a piece of media which shows queer and trans people just existing! I’m all for casual representation, and between this and his previous works which I have consumed, Sims has done it right.

If you’re looking for a horror which will evoke empathy in you, while simultaneously chilling you to the bone, this book is for you. This book is for everyone, really. Even if horror isn’t your usual genre, Jonathan Sims might just be the author to convert you to reading more.

When Diya Burman's best friend Angie dies, it feels like her own life is falling apart. Wanting a fresh start, she joins Slough & Sons a family firm that cleans up after the recently deceased.

Old love letters. Porcelain dolls. Broken trinkets. Clearing away the remnants of other people's lives, Diya begins to see things. Horrible things. Things that get harder and harder to write off as merely her grieving imagination. All is not as it seems with the Slough family. Why won't they speak about their own recent loss? And who is the strange man that keeps turning up at their jobs?

If Diya's not careful, she might just end up getting buried under the family tree.
Couldn’t put it down really gripping and really enjoyed this book totally recommend
Thank You NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group
I just reviewed Family Business by Jonathan Sims. #FamilyBusiness #NetGalley

I probably shouldn't have stayed awake until nearly 4am this morning reading this, but I just couldn't stop. I didn't expect the way the plot unravelled, but it drew me in and time flew. The writing was descriptive enough that I could imagine what was happening (so I may be looking over my shoulder today 🤣). I recommend reading it in daylight!

I thought this was ‘just’ going to be an entertaining book about a bereavement cleaning service, about one young woman’s journey with her grief. I thought it might be a bit gruesome too. But it’s much more than that. It has a mystical, supernatural element to it, it explores how magic and fantasy can be scary and dangerous and not trifled with.

I wasn’t completely enamoured with our main protagonist at first - don’t ask me why, there was nothing amiss with her, I just didn’t gel with her. But I soon became to enjoy her relationships between her and her colleagues, they were real foils of each other and made for such subtle but excellent scenes.

Considering the supernatural event to it, it all felt so real that I would imagine even the biggest magic sceptics amongst us would be hard pressed to deny it.

As someone who has been well acquainted with death and grief, I enjoyed the exploration of death and grief and a look at how we all deal with it in our own ways, and they may seem wrong to some people, but as long as it’s right for that person then it doesn’t matter.

It’s thrilling, I don’t mean that in a fast-paced, all guns blazing within the first couple of pages, no. It’s quieter than that. It grabs your hand and whispers “come with me” and you have no choice but to follow.

It’s a thriller, a fantasy, a horror, a science fiction; it flows really well and you’ll finish it before you know it. It’s scary but not hide-behind-your-sofa terrifying, vivid but not gory, amusing but not comedic, it’s the perfect balance of everything to give you an entertaining read.

It reads so well, so smoothly. It’s a first class piece of storytelling. It’s my first book by Jonathan Sims but it definitely won’t be my last.

This is a very unusual book, that will stretch your imagination. Diya's best friend Angie has died of cancer, and she is finding it difficult to cope. In a rash moment she leaves her office job and joins Slough and Sons as a cleaner. Except they don't clean office blocks, they clean up after sudden deaths. Frank, Xen and Mary become her lifeline, giving her life purpose and she finds the work fulfilling.

However, some jobs seem different. She begins to see visions of the lives and deaths of the people for whom she is cleaning, disturbing visions that she cannot understand. She begins to discover that working for Slough and Sons isn't quite as straightforward as she thought, but much more dangerous.

Very much in the style of Stephen King, which is a great compliment, this story will grip you and make you both want to race ahead to see what happens and fear to turn the page. A great read.

Thank you to NetGalley, Orion Publishing Group and Gollanz for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I previously enjoyed Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims, which was one of my favourite reads for 2020 so I was excited to start Family Business. They are two very different books, but Sims is a master of the horror genre and this new book really hooks you in and keeps the unease high before unleashing a paranormal threat on the main characters as the book rushes to an action-packed finale.

Our main character is Diya, a woman who has lost her way after her roommate dies. She starts a new job with Slough and Sons, a family business who perform deceased clean-ups. The family are strange enough, but when Diya starts getting visions and her memories start to fade, she soon realises things are not all they seem. Diya is a well-rounded character and the portrayal of grief over her roommate is really touchingly drawn. The other characters are all well-defined and easily relatable – the gothic Xen, spiritual Mary and gruff Frank all have their own secrets but are still interesting in their own right. The deaths that they clean up are gory or even just sad at times and the flashbacks to see into their minds at the time of their death is a nice twist.

The build up to the paranormal element with the introduction of Mr Bill is written carefully and slowly, steadily building the tension and allowing space for a suspension of disbelief. Some of the scenes where Diya is running from the man with the eternal stretched smile were very creepy and difficult to read at night! I do perhaps think that some of the middle of the book could have been trimmed or edited down as it did feel like it dragged in a few places. This becomes particularly apparent when compared to the action-packed finale.

Overall Family Business is a spooky horror, perfect for Halloween reading on a cold, dark night. Thank you to NetGalley & Orion Publishing Group – Gollancz for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Jonny Sims is one of a very small handful of authors whose work I will read (or often in his case, listen to) immediately, no questions asked, no summary needed. Jonny Sims made it, so I will consume it.

This book came to me at very funny time. Funny-coincidental, not funny-haha. Like I said a moment ago, I don’t need to vet my Jonny Sims content before I add it to my TBR; he’s got a standing invitation to take up space there any time he wants. The funny thing is, this book almost reads as though it was written very extremely specifically for me to read at this exact moment in my life. Earlier this year, I purchased my first home. The previous owner had passed away from brain cancer, leaving no family behind, so when I got the house, it was still full of her old possessions. The past eight months of my life have been spent cleaning up the remains of someone else’s life, getting glimpses into the person she must have been through the things she left behind. Many, many trips to the dump and many more donation runs to goodwill, the house is feeling less and less like living in the shadow of someone else’s life.

This tangent is relevant.

I am, in a far less dark and far more mundane way, doing something of the same job that Diya found herself in. I found so much to resonate with in the more and reflective portions of the narrative, in the quiet tragedy of a life unremembered and sorted through by strangers. This was, unexpectedly, the strength of the novel for me. Jonny Sims has a way of displaying observations about the world that make them feel meaningful – not just in the ways that he pulls horror from the mundane, but also in the ways that he shines a light on the small injustices of the world, the ones that hide in the places that society overlooks. He can pull the tragedy of the world into sharp and horrific focus.

I think The Magnus Archives will “haunt” Jonny’s career as a novelist, in that it is so very tempting to sort his newer work into the categories laid out by the Fears, the entities he fleshed out so well in his much acclaimed podcast. I now find myself sorting most horror into the 15 fears – a lasting take away from the Magnus Archives that I simply can’t shake. I suspect Jonny’s audience will have a hard time not doing so here. Mr. Bill is so well suited as an avatar of the Lonely, after all.

That being said, I think this novel is an outstanding standalone piece. It’s stronger than his first novel, Thirteen Storeys, both structurally and conceptually (I loved that book, but it wavers a bit in the structure department). I think he is well on his way to a spectacular career as a novelist.

Diya is introduced to the Slough family when her best friend dies, and they offer her a job. From the first day clearing up after a death, she gets strange visions connected to the deceased. As time goes on a strange man appears everywhere. What is his connection to the family, and why does the horror appear only to the lonely?
Great horror novel that gets scarier by the page!

Family Business is told from the perspective of a young woman named Diya. She has left her dead-end job in an office to work another job cleaning up the remains of the dead with a questionable business named Slough & Sons.

After meeting Frank, the owner of Slough & Sons, and his two daughters Mary and Xen, when they come to clear her home after the death of her best friend Angie, she is offered the job. Filling the boots of George, Frank’s son who died in an accident, Diya is taken through a whirlwind of events that make her question her own sanity.
I loved the absolute insanity that is this book. It is told from multiple perspectives, but the story is told directly from Diya and how she tackles the world that she is thrown into. Diya is a complex character trying to deal with the death of her best friend, weird memory loss and strange visions that start to take over her everyday life.

I highly recommend this book if you like unexpected twists and turns, a gore induced novel that makes you wonder what the hell is going on. This is the first book I have read by Jonathan Sims and I cannot wait to read more of his work.

FAMILY BUSINESS is about a family-run cleaning service who attend death scenes after the police have been and gone and chemically clean away the evidence. When Diya, freshly grieving the death of her best friend, is brought on board, she thinks she’ll never get used to the scent of death. But that’s not all she’s taking with her from the scenes she visits – Diya starts experiencing visions, echos of the experiences of the people who’ve died. Afraid to tell anyone, she quickly learns there are more to the jobs than meets the eye.

I adored Jonathan Sims’s THIRTEEN STORIES and FAMILY BUSINESS hits all the same notes his debut did – unsettling, at times truly terrifying, and ultimately a deeper conversation about people and a specific social issue. It’s a story about loss, about family, and about who we get to remember after they’re gone. Sims is impossibly talented, and his future books are going to be auto-buys for me.

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I really enjoyed Thirteen Storeys when I read that a while back so I was quite excited and intrigued to get my hand on this, his latest book. And I wasn't disappointed!
We follow Diya as her world is going to rat... Her best friend, and flatmate, has just died and, well, that has triggered the rest of her life pretty much imploding. But it is a chance offer of a job that starts to allow her to believe that things might not always be so bad. Ironically, it's a job with a cleaning company. One which specialises in cleaning up after the recently departed. In fact the one she herself used to help with her clean-up. So she begins her work in earnest, learning on the job from the two daughters Xen and Mary. Staring with the more simple, and less yukky, tasks of sorting through their stuff, and then the easier cleaning. But here is where things get a bit weird as she starts to experience things, feeling first and then she starts to slip away and, well, sort of hallucinate. But not in a good way. It appears that there is darkness afoot. And then there's the question of what happened to the third sibling George who "quit" the family firm...
This is juicy, and horrible and all things delightful! I know that's contradictory but there you are! It's over the top but deliciously so and just about manages to stay the right side of farce whilst still retaining a decent amount of horror, gore and bonkers.
The characters are brilliant and really bring the story to life. I loved Diya, she's so much more than she thinks she is and that's quite humbling. Her interactions with Xen and Mary are well crafted and wholly believable. Especially when it all starts to go a bit South!
The story is a tad slow initially as it builds up - and that build up is wholly necessary as the foundations need to be strong to hold up the escalation when it really gets going. And it definitely does that! Leaving me breathless and satisfied.
All in all a cracking read that I have no hesitation in recommending for fans of the genre. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.