Rating: 3 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel
Alone on a road that shouldn’t exist — where time and distance seem mere suggestions — Etain finds a corpse being eaten by dogs. With only the burning weight of a strange ring on her finger and in a muzzy, dream-like fugue, she gets out of the car. Gathering up the body, whose face has been eaten away, she places him in the back of the car and begins to drive, to get away from the dogs, to get away from the night, to find a farmhouse with a phone so that the authorities can be called and the body properly seen to.
In the middle of the night, in a small, poor farmhouse, the farmer and his wife wait. They wait for the bride and the groom, for the promise of greater wealth. When Etain comes in, she is given a bed. Her wedding bed. Five days later, Etain escapes, claiming no memory of what happened. And she’s pregnant.
Years later, Ashling is a bitter young woman, confused and lost, dealing with an alcoholic mother who still mourning the loss of Ashling’s twin sister — the blonde haired, smiling, light of her life. Her mother bitterly resents the daughter who was left behind, the one who should have been kidnapped instead. Ashling, though, has a plan. Maybe it’s not a good one, but she has it, because Ashling knows what really happened to her sister.
Her sister wasn’t kidnapped by her father, who then killed himself. No, she was taken by the thing in the box, the black box that sits in the middle of a white room on a never changing children’s show. A monster lives in that box, feeding on children, and Ashling is going to kill it.
I really liked parts of this story … and was fine with the rest of it. Etain’s story, the eerie, unsettled nightmare her life became, were well written and cheerfully burrowed beneath my skin. The hints and stories about changelings, about the mysterious priest, about the monster on the children’s television show were filled with all sorts of dark promise. The otherworldly feeling, the graphic imagery, and the visceral gory scenes were so much fun.
Ashling’s love story with Betty, on the other hand, didn’t quite sync up with the rest of the plot. I think the normalcy of Ashling falling in love, of Betty being nothing more than a woman in love, who had faith in the strength of her love, was meant to be a foil for Ashling’s combative relationship with her mother and herself, as well as a light in the dark to chase away the inhuman monsters… but it didn’t quite work. It felt too much like a separate story and took a great deal of time away from the one I wanted to read, which was the creepy children’s show and the monster in the box. When Ashling finally picks that earlier thread up again — having dropped it to fall in love — it was fine, just a little flat. I didn’t think the three sections (the horror of the beginning, the normalcy of the middle, and the adventure of the final third) meshed well. The middle section was a passive weight, and the final chapters just weren’t given enough time to build up the momentum they needed to give the final conflict that big emotional impact.
The love story itself is sweet. Betty falls in love with Ashley, who hides certain truths from her. Like her sister’s kidnapping, her father’s suicide, her mother’s rage; instead, it’s all easy affection, without commitment. When Ashling tries to pull away, Betty is right there to ask her if she really means it. When Ashling falters, Betty is there to support her, and when Ashling suffers, Betty is the one to hold her through the pain and confusion. Ashling tries so hard to be there for Betty, to be a good girlfriend. She loves her entirely and doesn’t want to be a burden, to ruin Betty’s life. However, Ashling never really finds the strength in herself to accept that she’s worthy of love. It feels like she just sort of accepts it because the story ran out of time to really devote to that discovery. Still, the romance is nice.
The question of what happened to Etain that night, and who — or what — is the father of her children (if they even have the same father) is always lurking in the background, but only for the reader. Ashling is oblivious to it, and Etain’s point of view vanishes once the children are born. This felt like a book with so much potential that just didn’t quite manage to do all the things it wanted.
All in all, the writing is good. The pacing is rushed, and there’s never enough time for scenes to really develop any weight before it’s on to the next one. The characters were shallow, but the romance was put together well enough that I bought it. I really recommend the first third, recommend the second third, and was let down by the final third … so it’s a three-star rating for me.
If you give this a try, I hope you enjoy it, but beware that there is quite a bit of gore, violence against animals, mentions of alcoholism, kidnapping of a child, emotional abuse by a parent, and suicidal ideation.
