Catriona Ward is on a nice publishing schedule, especially for a writer whose work plays with darker, horrific themes. Since reading The Last House on Needless Street, I’ve been considering a new book from her as an annual Halloween/Spooky Season read. Her 2023 release, Looking Glass Sound is one that fits the bill quite nicely.
In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow has begun the last book he will ever write.
It is the story about the sun-drenched summer days of his youth in Whistler Bay, and the blood-stained path of the killer that stalked his small vacation town. About the terrible secret he and his companions, Nat and Harper, discovered entombed in the coves off the bay. And how the pact they swore that day echoed down the decades, forever shaping their lives.
But the more Wilder writes, the less he trusts himself and his memory. He starts to see things that can’t be real – notes hidden in the cabin, from an old friend now dead; a woman with dark hair drowning in the icy waters below, calling for help; entire chapters he doesn’t recall typing, appearing overnight. Who, or what, is haunting Wilder?
No longer able to trust his own eyes, Wilder begins to fear that this will not only be his last book, but the last thing he ever does.
We’ve got a story within a story in Looking Glass Sound, as we have a memoir from Wilder Harlow which recounts the Summer he spent in the waterside city of Castine, Maine in the cottage left to his parents by his deceased uncle. This is where Wilder makes his first true friends: Nathaniel, the boy next door and Harper, the young woman vacationing from the UK. Like many friendships that form when childhood is in the rearview mirror and adulthood is on the horizon, the bonds Harlow forms with Nat and Harper have a lifelong impact. Of course, both Nat and Wilder develop a crush on Harper despite some of her rather cynical retorts and pranks.
As the bonds of friendship between Wilder, Nat, and Harper ignites and grows, they become obsessed with the Dagger Man of Whistler Bay, a local legend thought to be responsible for multiple murders. What makes this local boogeyman that even more creepy is his “signature” – he takes Polaroid photographs of children while they sleep, usually with a knife at the throat or some other kind of threatening gesture captured in still life. …and oh yeah, several women have gone missing in Castine over the years.
The following summer is not the return to holiday friends Harlow expected it to be. His friend Nat winds up in the hospital and Harper’s humor and pranks become more mean spirited and offensive. As if that weren’t enough, the Dagger Man seems to reemerge and clues about the murderer’s identity are nearly as disturbing as the deeds thought to be associated with the local boogeyman.
The trauma of the summer lingers with Harlow when he meets a young writer named Skye Montague. Sky is very friendly and makes strong overtures to Harlow to the point of wanting to become Harlow’s roommate. Harlow is, understandably, a bit unsettled by Montague, especially with Montague’s insistence on learning more about that fateful summer.
Ward takes a coming-of-age story and mixes it with murder and storytelling into a wicked cocktail of a novel. Throw in some metafictional elements like an eerie poem that emerges between chapters and characters who slip in and out of one characters’ reality and the pages of the story they are telling and Looking Glass Sound is a truly unique novel. Memory. Grief. Friendship. These are often intertwined elements of our experiences and Ward plays them together naturally and quote powerfully in this novel and in the character of Wilder Harlow. Like other novels I’ve read by Ward, games are played in her fiction, her novels are almost like puzzle-boxes for the reader to solve. Like The Last House on Needles Street, there’s an element of the unreliable narrator at play in this novel, which makes it an even more challenging – and enjoyable – puzzle-novel to try to solve.
Looking Glass Sound is a fascinating novel whose horrors are both subtle and overt and above all else, unsettling. It is a novel and story that will linger and ultimately poses more questions than it tries to answer.
Recommended
© 2023 Rob H. Bedford
Published by Tor Nightfire | August 2023
Hardcover | 339 Pages
Excerpt: https://thenerddaily.com/looking-glass-sound-by-catriona-ward-excerpt/
https://twitter.com/Catrionaward
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
