This month’s books deal with disturbances — in people’s minds, in their families and in the heavens. In Sarah Easter Collins’s THINGS DON’T BREAK ON THEIR OWN (Crown, 259 pp., $28) Willa Martenwood has been haunted by the disappearance of her 13-year-old sister, Laika, for more than two decades. One of the manifestations of Willa’s restless obsession is that she sees Laika everywhere, even at the dinner party that begins the story.
“She could be anyone,” Willa tells another woman at the table. “I mean, she could be you.”
Part of the book takes place at this queasy-making gathering, where the guests drink, trade freighted remarks and reveal more than they intended. And part takes place in the past, as Willa and Laika’s monstrous childhoods unfold. Their father was violent and sadistic, especially toward Laika — “I should have looked after her,” Willa thinks later — and he seemed suspiciously unbothered when she vanished.
At dinner, talk turns to the treacherous fallibility of memory. “It’s truly extraordinary how easily the human brain can be tricked into believing it remembers something that didn’t happen,” observes Liv, a psychologist. “Even on a simple level, we can have wildly differing memories of a single event.”
It’s clear that this line of thought is far from theoretical and that the key to the mystery lies in the murky recesses of the past, which takes on more prominence as the story goes on. There’s a murder here, and it happens when you least expect it.
You’re going to wonder what inappropriate book is concealed inside the jacket of “Anne of Green Gables,” which creepy Rose Barclay, age 9, is performatively pretending to read in Sarah Pekkanen’s HOUSE OF GLASS (St. Martin’s, 340 pp., $29). “The first word isn’t ‘Anne,’” says Stella Hudson, the weirded-out narrator, who’s spotted the subterfuge. “It’s ‘The.’”
“The Bad Seed”? “The Exorcist”? Our imaginations run wild. It’s only one of the disturbing things about Rose, who hasn’t said a word since her nanny plunged to her death from a third-floor window. Her rich parents have stripped the house of all its glass, even replacing the windowpanes with acrylic, but Rose seems to be amassing broken shards and other potential weapons in her room.
As the lawyer representing Rose in her parents’ divorce, Stella has to help determine who should get custody. (Why anyone would want it is another matter.) But soon she’s also investigating the nanny’s death and turning up unsavory facts about this very odd family. Her own traumatic childhood should put her in prime position to get inside Rose’s head.
The characters wander along the perimeter of believability. They include Rose’s super-uptight mother, her philandering father and her overly protective grandmother. The sentences are short and portentous; the plot is lurid; the revelations are bold. Anxiety, and similes, stalk the pages. “Do the others not feel the darkness wafting through the house, snaking into the corners and curling around us like smoke?” Stella asks.
All of which is to say that if you like some light familial terror, this book is pleasantly diverting. It’s also not too taxing. If you fall asleep midsentence at the beach and wake up five hours later, you can still pick up right where you left off.
The year is 1997, and “dark excitement and dread” have suffused the small Australian town of Jericho. For the first time in more than 4,000 years, the spectacular St. John comet is scheduled to blaze across the sky, bringing wonder and fear in equal measures.
Sylvia, the grieving young widow at the heart of Ruby Todd’s gorgeously written BRIGHT OBJECTS (Simon & Schuster, 334 pp., $28.99), has a special interest in the comet (which appears to be a fictionalized version of the real-life Hale-Bopp comet). When it appears, she plans to kill herself.
The book asks big existential questions about fate, the cosmos and the thin membrane between life and death. Is St. John a portent of doom, as so many believe? Certainly it’s causing a stir. “The comet seemed to be revealing us all to ourselves and to each other, in our various registers of fear, hope and hubris,” Sylvia thinks.
Though the book cranks into an unexpected thrillerish gear toward the end, the mysteries here aren’t showy. Will Sylvia find out who drove the car that killed her husband two years earlier? Will meeting a new man — the mysterious Theo St. John, the astronomer who happens to have discovered the comet — be enough to restore her to her axis? And just how dangerous is Joseph Evans, a local man who appears to be going off the deep end, dragging his increasingly fanatical followers with him?
Mostly the suspense has to do with how people bear the heavy burdens of love, guilt, grief and mortality, all mysteries of a more universal sort. The prose burns bright.
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