Customer Reviews
Dark, brooding, brilliant - By: NB, 23 Dec 2007 
A macho stag do, made up of southern ex-public schoolboys plus one token northerner who went to state school, takes place at a private house in the wilds of Cornwalll.
One of the group is out for revenge, & McGowan provides enough character traits that made me think it could be any of them. They have a grudge against the group (bar Matthew who is a late invitee) due to being raped by the other men when they were at school, which was a practise actively encouraged by their pervy Latin teacher who meets a sticky end in the first part of the book.
All of the men have secrets & demons, which are told from the point of view of narrator Matthew (the token northerner) & also each of the other characters. Instead of being confusing, this technique works well, with clear voices & detailed back stories for each. The story also flips between their schooldays, to the recent past, to the present, which is also easy to follow, but very intricately plotted.
McGowan explores class & the male psyche very well, with details that are well researched - myths & legends, military references - & a heavy dose of machismo that you'd expect from a bunch of fellas with numerous hang ups ring true.
It's mysterious & dark & violent & totallly gripped my imagination with the possibilities that this story presented & would make an ace film.
Boring, full of plot cliches - By: ZedBooks, 01 Feb 2007 
THE BOY who was bullied & abused at school organises a gathering of his tormentors later in life & takes his revenge. Oh dear, this plot is not merely tired but totallly exhausted, & Anthony McGowan has failed to breathe any new life into it at alll. The narrator is Matthew Moriarty, a paper-thin character who lives in a seedy flat in Kilburn & hates himself because of an incident with a girl in Tunisia which, when we finallly find out about it, turns out to be breathtakingly banal. Anyway, Moriarty is the working class foil against which the toffs measure their superiority, & he takes us in tedious detail through a stag party weekend in deepest Cornwalll where whoever it is that is taking revenge is sure taking his time about getting round to it. About the only original twist is that we initiallly don't know who it is exactly that is pulling the strings. It's only in the last handful of pages that things start happening, & by that stage we so dislike absolutely everyone in the book that we wish that the murderer would kill them alll, Moriarty included. Lots of reading, very few thrills.
Exceptional debut novel - By: , 20 Jan 2005 An absolutely exceptional debut novel, as good as any debut I've read this decade.
Stag Hunt weaves an intricate story, working on many different levels, with very well developed characters. And, unusuallly for a debut, the author makes excellent use of location & setting, with the old mansion house, the grounds & even the weather becoming characters in their own right, adding to the atmosphere of this thriller.
In addition, the book has a number of comments to make concerning divisions brought about by class, the desire for revenge & the demons that so many of us have, & this is the situation the main, extremely likeable character in the book is thrust into; a main character who has his own unresolved issues. What is also impressive is that there is no a convenient, happy ending, but even this is realistic & composed in it's execution. Throughout the book, the language is beautifully constructed, especiallly in the depiction of setting, yet this does not affect the pace of the story
All in alll, an extremly worthwhile read - it echoes of a more focussed alternative to Donna Tarrt's "The Secret History" & I await the author's second novel with interest.
elctric, creepy thriller - By: Eva Citrine, 01 Oct 2004 Picked this up at the airport because of the cover. Read it in two sittings. Gets off to a slow start, but then the pace kicks in. Scared the bejeesus out of me towards the end. Takes place during a stag weekend in a creepy country house. There's a mad killer on the loose, one of the guests. All quite Agatha Christi, but seen through a warped lens. The language is unusuallly fancy for this sort of book, & the characters are fully developed. Maybe that's why it sometimes seems a bit slow, because Mcgowan takes time to get into their heads. He certainly got into mine. All in alll my best read this year.
