“Dead people don’t come back. They don’t come back and they can’t hurt you.”
I want you to do something: I want you to read Sarah Pinborough. Start with THE TAKEN. Pin the sentence above to your bed’s footboard, or on your desk, or the ceiling above the couch, or wherever it is you do your reading. You’re going to need it. You shouldn’t need to make several copies of the mantra, as you’re likely to polish the book off in one frantic sitting.
But you will need to repeat it, again and again, if you’re to convince yourself it’s true as you experience Pinborough’s chilling tale of a vengeful murdered girl. It’s one of the best of its kind since Peter Straub’s GHOST STORY. Really.
Before you begin, you might want to brush up on your Ramsey Campbell. Relearn words like “mum” and “niggling” and “settee” and “duvet.” Being from England, Pinborough may not write exactly like your favorite American authors, but when it comes to quick, bloody frights and especially slow-building suspense with a big payoff, you’ll find her language universal.
Good, scary children are few and far between in horror fiction, but when done right, as in THE TAKEN, they can be terrifying and believable. It’s easy to explain goose bumps when you’re reading about someone real like Mary Bell, the 10-year old English girl who murdered some of her playmates and giggled about it, but when the resurrection element is added, all we have is a string of hits and mostly misses that stretches beyond the gates of the pet sematary.
But Pinborough pulls it off.
She doesn’t waste any time setting the stage and sprinkling it with relatable places and characters, including Alexandra, the terminally ill niece of one of an isolated village’s oldest residents. Alex is helping prepare for her cousin Paul’s 40th birthday party when her Aunt Mary suffers what Alex and Paul believe is a heat-related hallucination. While working in the yard, Mary sees something that can’t possibly be there, and her family and friends watch her deteriorate before their eyes.
For Mary and others, it’s just the recurrence of a nightmare born 30 years before the first events in the book take place. Then, a deranged little girl named Melanie Parr disappeared mysteriously, although her tragic story isn’t much of a puzzle to certain residents of Watterrow. As Melanie makes appearances throughout the first half of the book, visually and otherwise, skeptical visitors and newcomers to the peaceful village are forced to act. And to believe in The Catcher Man, the purgatorial godfather who supposedly steals the souls of children who stray, and who is a striking metaphor for the place where the older residents of Watterrow keep their own secrets hidden away.
Mary eventually recovers from her incoherent rambling and speaks plainly of Melanie and The Catcher Man – much to Paul’s chagrin – and the strange occurrences continue to plague the village. Unfamiliar children are seen playing in the rain, battery-drained cell phones alight with messages beckoning their owners from beyond, a beloved vicar dies while muttering Melanie’s name, and more children disappear.
One unfortunate resident meets a unique and bloody end Ed Lee would be proud of, but thankfully, Pinborough never completely abandons the more subtle horror of isolation, where her writing shines. Alex, an atheist, is battling cancer, an affliction that won’t allow her to get close to anyone, including her cousin’s attractive friend. And as the storm neatly seals the town off, closing the roads and phone lines, the characters are forced to deal with the past, present and future of Watterrow.
THE TAKEN has wide appeal, but what appears an entertaining ghost story and revenge tale ingeniously morphs into something much more complex. And as Pinborough deftly weaves the storylines together in the second half of the book, we learn that there is more to the residents of Watterrow, and Melanie has returned not only to exact her revenge, but to do shed light on the town’s dark secrets.
“Dead people don’t come back. They don’t come back and they can’t hurt you.” Go ahead. Say it. Sarah Pinborough dares you. –Jason Light
Related posts:
- Hook House and Other Horrors
- The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein
- Jimbo / The Education of Uncle Paul
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Sounds pretty neat. Last time I stayed up to finish a book was when I read IT for the first time. Couldn’t put it down (except for the one time I actually had to check under my bed for a deranged clown).
Added this to my Amazon list.
Gal
Already got this on my list…. Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon were recommending this writer in a web interview.