Book Review: "Looking Glass Sound" by Catriona Ward

"The leaves of the sugar maple whisper—under it, there’s a high-pitched whine, a long shrill note like bad singing…it sounds like all the things you’re not supposed to believe in—mermaids, selkies, sirens…’What’s that sound?’ It seems like it’s coming from inside of me, somehow. Dad pauses in the act of unlocking the door. ‘It’s the stones on the beach. High tide has eaten away at them, making little holes—kind of like finger stops on a flute—and when the wind is in the east, coming over the ocean, it whistles through."

After reading Catriona Ward's Sundial, I did not think there would be anything as good as The Last House on Needless Street again. Looking Glass Sound is about as close as we get so far though. A psychological thriller weaved with moments of horror and strange happenings that are slowly unravelled as something entirely different. Catriona Ward has a great eye for detail and definitely plays it out here in a novel filled with uncertainty and ambiguity.

After his uncle dies, 16-year-old Wilder and his parents are left a house on the coast of Maine where he is to meet two other teenagers named Nat and Harper. After agreeing to spend summers together, their lives are changed by an uncertain talk about the Dagger Man who takes pictures of children whilst they sleep and has been rumoured to be involved in mysterious murders too.

When Wilder heads off to college he meets the insufferable Sky Montague who seems like a good friend at first but there is always some strangeness about whether Sky is just trying to get information out of Wilder for a book he's writing. Unfortunately that's how it is and Sky goes on to publish a successful novel by stealing Wilder's history and turning into profit. Wilder though, wants to have a go and telling it like it is.

As tragedy surrenders to more tragedy, Wilder's life is filled with a strange and eerie atmosphere, noises and creeps in the dark. A sensory vision, Catriona Ward weaves terror between the lines of this novel of secrecy, death and haunting. In between the narrative are people like Pearl, who lost her mother and Harper, a rebellious oddity. There are characters such as the lost and distant Betty, Sandra who spends time drinking vermouth and trying to forget. Each and every character has their grievance and in ways, I think it worked very well.

At moments, I thought there was too much dialogue for my liking, but as I got into the story, I saw it as a necessity and I began to accept it. There is a good balance between atmosphere and dialogue and the author is not using the dialogue to replace the story, but merely as parts of flashbacks and side steps, introducing pieces of conversation where it is of prime importance to learn about what is going on. The Dagger Man seems to be one of those contentious topics between teenagers like the 'Bloody Mary' hauntings and, just like an internet creepypasta, the three of them take it a bit far and end up getting into a lot of trouble. After the writings on the wall are clearly etched into frame, we know that Harper, Nat, Wilder, Betty and many more will never be the same again.

I also enjoyed the 'story-within-a-story' concept. Normally, it either works or it doesn't but at times, though I felt like it wasn't working, it would show me that it definitely was. It felt important for the book to be done this way so everything didn't feel prescriptive or dictated to us, the reader could feel like they too were experiencing these harrowing memories by Wilder and following him around at these difficult times.

At times it felt like Brideshead Revisited with these friends going a bit too far and then never really coming together again, it felt like The Talented Mr Ripley especially when Sky Montague became involved and then again it felt like a modern tragedy as we were left with suspicions that turned to realities that turned into horrors. A supernatural thriller mixed with a detective novel blended with moments of visceral terror - this book definitely makes a good, long, read of constant nightmares.