The water is deep and dark. I spit, my mouth is full of cold weed and small snails crawl over my face. My rotting hand reaches for the circle of light, the top of the barrel. Trapped, I scream and the water rushes in. My skin begins to slip from my body as I fight my way free of the barrel that holds me.
- page 122
Everybody has a story. But portions of anyone’s story are also portions of another person’s story. Who owns that story?
When Wilder’s mother and father decide to vacation at Whistler’s Bay, staying in his late uncle’s house, Wilder finally sheds his isolation and makes friends: Nat, who lives in Whistler’s Bay with his father, and Harper, whose family summers there. The summer passes quickly and despite a prank that went wrong, Wilder feels accepted in a way he never has before even though his attraction to Harper is unreciprocated. Still, before the summer ends, signs of trouble appear: Whistler’s Bay is rife with rumors of someone sneaking into houses and photographing sleeping children, and Wilder finds one of the photographs.
As their second summer together draws closer, Wilder is anxious to join his friends but the summer ends early. Disappearances over the last few years, women who have been thought to drown in the bay, even a local Wilder had seen in town, have been revealed as murders. The three teens first become involved in the investigation, and the result of that investigation dictates their futures. Wilder tries to make sense of it all by writing about it.
Still, who owns that story? Skye, who Wilder later meets in college, takes his notes and publishes a book based on them, leaving Wilder feeling bereft of his own memories.
Each of us lives in our own story, but our story overlaps with those with whom we interact. Maybe never more so than when sharing a transformative, even traumatic, event. If you write the story that transformed you or transformed your understanding of life and yourself, are you also taking someone else’s story?
I could see the late Peter Straub enjoying this novel. Like Straub, Ward interrogates the power and magic of story, of books, but also of perception and memory from which the stories stem. Doing so she creates characters who seem real enough to have met on the street. In particular, Wilder, whose struggle to come to terms with himself during the progress of puberty is relatable; and later, as the older Wilder examines his experiences in Whistler’s Bay and after, the facts and his imperfect memories of them, the novel becomes a melancholy reflection of all our strivings to locate our place in the world. My final thought on Looking Glass Sound is that it’s a novel so layered and thoughtful it would reward a second reading.
© 2026 Randy Money
Hardback | Viper
LOOKING GLASS SOUND by Catriona Ward
April 2023 | 352 pages
ISBN: 978-1800810976
