Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward (2023)
Like countless others, I became a lifelong fan of Catriona Ward starting with "The Last House On Needless Street". And in her subsequent books, I loved the deep dives into lifetimes of horrific family histories, all unfolding amid landscapes both beautiful and threatening.
"Looking Glass Sound" does indeed contain all those familiar tropes, but in the book's second half, the author takes them to a whole new ambitious level of dazzling complexity. And there's no getting around it, the literary magic show on display here demands you give every sentence your complete attention.........or you won't even begin to comprehend what's going on.
I can understand why some readers grew impatient and exasperated, choosing to jump off. But I found myself so entranced by the book's hall-of-mirrors plotting and staggering risks. I hung on for dear life, taking the full ride. I'm not sorry I did.
It begins like a traditional Stephen King-like, easy-to-digest crowd pleaser. Three teens share a summer together at a Maine coastal town - Wilder, Nathanial and Harper, the wild child girl they're both obsessed with. But hanging over the teens and the town is the terrifying 'Daggerman' a serial killer who also takes Polaroids of the town's children while asleep in their beds.
The capture and reveal of the killer reverberates for decades to come, with the publication of different books that fictionalize the three teens' life changing summer. But how much did each author bend reality to make it suit their vision of what really happened? Are any of these accounts reliable in any way?
(This is the point at which readers must stay glued to the pages to fully absorb the tidal wave of twists and the darkest of reveals unleashed in the final chapters.)
Ultimately 'Looking Glass Sound' functions as a melancholic view of the power of books to offer their characters immortality in print, for better or worse......as well as a meditation on how the passage of years warp the truth of our memories, for better or worse.
This book's far from a zippy horror page turner, but I found myself willing to take on the challenges it threw down and the complete upending of its narrative. And that made it a 5 star (*****) read for me.
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