Noah Turner's family are haunted by monsters that are all too real, strange creatures that visit them all: His bookish mother Margaret; Lovecraft-obsessed father Harry; eldest sister Sydney, born for the spotlight; the brilliant but awkward Eunice, a gifted writer and storyteller - the Turners each face their demons alone. When his terminally-ill father becomes obsessed with the construction of an elaborate haunted house - the Wandering Dark - the family grant his last wish, creating themselves a legacy, and a new family business in their grief. But families don't talk about the important things, and they try to shield baby Noah from horrors, both staged and real.
As the family falls apart, fighting demons of poverty, loss and sickness, the real monsters grow ever closer. Unbeknownst to them, Noah is being visited by a wolfish beast with glowing orange eyes. Noah is not the first of the Turners to meet the monster, but he is the first to let it into his room...
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[He was someone who acted out our psyches]***
(@TitanBooks, 2 June 2020, 448 pages, ebook, #ARC from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is the author's debut. I thought it was great and look forward to reading his next book. This is not the horror novel I was expecting. The focus is more on a highly dysfunctional family and their own personal monsters with a hint of the supernatural. It's dark, disturbing, taboo, weird but well written and completely engaged me. The characters are among the best I've ever read in fiction, sort of mangled and seriously messed up, but completely empathic all the same. The story is told in a linear fashion which I usually don't like but works really well here. The linear events are broken up with script extracts which made no sense to me for ages. This touches on a lot of dark subject matter that can be hard to swallow at times such as depression, suicide, rape, child abuse and neglect to name but some. This is not a light or easy read by any means. This really struck a chord with me.
