Blood Hunt by Neil.M.Gunn

Blood Hunt Essay!

In my opinion the story “Blood Hunt” by Scottish author Neil Miller Gunn meets the criteria if a good novel.

Blood Hunt has the criteria of a good novel as Neil Gunn embeds four memorable story lines, the hunt, the desperation, the love triangle and the biggest story line being, the murder.

Not only does Neil Gunn use memorable story lines, he also uses memorable characters, who throughout his novel he develops and reveals little by little their past   and family life.   To do this, Gunn reveals the information about the characters in list, as it is relative to what is going on in the story at that time, he then builds a character sketch so you have a visual image of said character. Neil Gunn builds up the main character of Sandy better than any other in the story. You have his life, his lust and his future, all leading into the story and the other characters lives. At the start of the novel you get the physical description of Sandy, he’s the typical old man, grey haired and so   on. However, as the novel progresses Gunn shows you his past as a seaman, who had a lover from Italy who died, and who then moved on to be a crofter.
During the essay, the author reverts back to Sandy’s past as a seaman a lot, using similes and metaphors to do this. “hung onto his persistence as to a rope on a sea-washed deck”. Neil Gunn uses Sandy’s past, present and future to link into every other character, by doing this every character is linked in one way or another. As Gunn goes deeper into Blood Hunt, he furthers into Sandy and Allan’s relationship, showing that Allan was the good guy and that it wasn’t like him to be a murder. “He never had a vicious quirk in him”. It also showed that Sandy was the only one Allan could trust and that Sandy wouldn’t let him down. This told the reader that Sandy was one of the nice ones.
Although   Sandy was the main character, the author also goes into the lives of the murder victim Robert and his brother/police officer...