I’d heard a lot of good things about this book so I chose it for my book group for the annual Halloween Horror read. The time pressure on reading it means I had to put aside book 72 to read this. The review of book 72 will follow shortly.
Black Springs is not your average village. It’s haunted by the ghost of a 17th century witch. Her eyes and lips are sewn shut and her arms are chained to her sides. She can vanish and appear wherever she likes at will. The locals are so used to her that she’s just a part of the furniture. They have a complex system of cameras to track her movements around the town and clever schemes to hide her if she appears in front of outsiders.
There’s a downside. If you move to the village, you can never leave. Anyone who stays outside the town borders for too long starts to experience suicidal thoughts that will only go away if they return home. The local teens are bored of the situation and want to make their own fun.
That’s the basis for this exceptionally original treatment of the old Witch’s Curse trope. We mainly follow the Grant family, with diversions to other locals every now and again.
The normalisation of such a strange situation with the townspeople is brilliantly done, and the changes as the mask of normalcy start to slip are the stuff of nightmare.
It’s well written for the most part. There are some flashes of brilliance in there. For example, at one point, when one of the human antagonists has just punched his own mother in the face and knocked her to the ground, we get the line ““I told you not to touch me,” he said softly.” That use of the word softly after a barbaric act of violence tells us he’s in complete control of himself and made me genuinely worried for the other characters and what he might be capable of doing.
The final chapters, once the s**t has really hits the fan, form one of the best horror set pieces I’ve read in years. The book has one of the best finales in recent fiction. My first thought on putting the book down at two in the morning (there wasn’t a chance I could put it down in the middle of all that mayhem) was ‘Wow that was intense’.
It’s not a perfect book. I did think there were some issues with pacing. There was a lot of building to an event then life back to normal, build to the next one. In the days since I finished it I realise that this is just an extension of the whole normalisation theme of the book, but it grated slightly while reading it, Having said that, I also think it would have been nice to get to know some more villagers, and to know the villagers we did meet better, which would have impacted the pacing more, so I’m contradicting myself.
There were some events that didn’t quite gel with the American setting that might well have made more sense in the original Dutch version. Maybe I would have accepted them better with a Dutch setting...
Overall, I really enjoyed this book even with its flaws. There's the occasional bon mot and the ending is one of the most horrific in a good way that I've read in recent years. I will be seeking out more of his work, When he wants to disturb the reader, this book shows he's more than capable.
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