The Reach of Children

True fear is the kind you can’t escape in the daytime. It’s easy to dismiss the boogeyman hiding under the bed or the shapeless thing crouching in the closet in broad daylight. But true fear — such as the fear of losing someone you love — never quite goes away. This is the fear that Tim Lebbon examines in his poignant, powerful novella THE REACH OF CHILDREN.

REACH concerns Daniel, a thoughtful 10-year-old boy who essentially loses both parents on the same day. He loses his mother to death; his father, wrapped up in grief, descends into the madness of depression and alcohol, leaving the young boy to fend largely for himself. His father’s longtime friend Gary fills in where he can, but in the days after his mother’s death, Daniel is largely adrift, trying to somehow make sense of his enormous loss.

Part of the process for Daniel is spending time in his parents’ bedroom. It is the place where his mother died, and it’s the last place he can really feel close to her. During one of his excursions into the room, he discovers a small, wooden box tucked away under the bed. Impulsively, he taps it – and something inside it taps back.

Eventually, his father catches him in the room and banishes him from ever going back. Of course, we all know what good banishing a bright, curious young boy from anywhere does, and it isn’t long before he’s exploring the room again. One night, Daniel hears a voice coming from the box beneath the bed — a high, lonely voice whispering, “I’m scared.” He manages a brief conversation with the voice – they talk about birds, a subject on which he and his mother had previously passed the time.

The box — and the mysterious voice inside it — continues to hold Daniel’s attention. When a friend tells him a local legend about a girl from the area who disappeared, only to be found in a nearby wooded area, and buried in a box similar to the one underneath Daniel’s parents’ bed, he begins to wonder if his father’s grief has turned into something more sinister — a suspicion that is strengthened when Daniel discovers his father’s connection to that very legend.

That plot point aside, THE REACH OF CHILDREN is far, far more than a potboiler mystery. It’s an examination of grief, one that is stunning in its clarity. Lebbon has felt loss of his own, and he channels every ounce of it into his story. Even if you haven’t lost a parent, or anyone truly close to you, REACH will give you a true sense of the kind of deep, unyielding sadness such an event brings. It’s a powerful book, and one that deserves to be read.

Unfortunately, publisher Humdrumming went under shortly after publishing this, making it — for now — a difficult book to get a hold of. But stories this powerful have a way of sticking around, and I’ll be shocked if it’s not soon made available to a wider audience. —Blu Gilliand

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BERSERK by Tim Lebbon
• THE EVERLASTING by Tim Lebbon