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The pivotal moments of Jackie's life are marked by trees in her neighbourhood. The one under which she had her first kiss, the one she hit with her car, the one she fell out of and broke her arm. On the morning she's decided to ask her best friend Ann on a date, she visits the house where her first-kiss tree stands only to find that the woman who lives there now has chopped it down. In revenge, she breaks the windows of the woman's car and is arrested. At the police station they want to take her fingerprints, so she escapes by becoming invisible, a neat trick even if the cost of it is time spent kneeling beside her mother's ghost as it leans over a toilet and vomits. Old man Charlie spends his days walking his old dog, Mitchie. People stop them in the street to pet Mitchie but while the dog loves the attention, Charlie doesn't really like people. At the apartment building where they live the ghost of a young girl, who carries her severed head under her arm, follows him around every day and pesters him until he knocks on Mrs Richards' door and tells her about the ghost who is trying to tell her something. Mrs Richards doesn't believe him. Ann and Margaret enjoyed a normal childhood until their mother turned into a monster. They chained her in the basement and fed her raw meat until that wasn't enough and they had to start stealing animals to feed her. Then Margaret starts to cough up blood and soon enough she's chained in the basement too and Ann has to quit school in order to find enough food for both of them. This book loosely brings these three stories together in what feels less like horror, more like tragedy. The characters are never fleshed out enough for us to care much for their fates and with the exception of a single moment of hope between Jackie and her distant father this is a depressing if short tale which feels ultimately pointless. The present tense narrative works to make what little action there is seem more immediate, but for the most part this is a meandering, unrewarding novella with an unsatisfactory ending which could have been an excellent novel had the writer decided to give more background to the characters and more depth to the plot. Madeleine Marsh is an aspiring writer who lives in the South West. She helps run sci-fi conventions and loves modern cinema.
Reviewed by Madeleine Marsh, September 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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