If you are an inveterate reader, the odds are good, better than good actually, that fellow readers or close friends (sometimes, happily, they are both) that at some point they will recommend a book to you.
A book, they will assure you with a mix of solemnity and enthusiasm, is the best thing they have read in ages and that you will love; it’s a privilege to be handed a book that way, and even better, as it is with the superlatively good Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney, if the book is every bit as good as advertised.
And honestly, Daisy Darker is every bit as good, if not brilliantly and evocatively better, than even the most fulsome of breathless recommendations which is saying something if you know the friend who handed me this week and swore I would LOVE it.
It really does deserve that kind of fervent response and the use of caps because in this book set at Halloween, Feeney has crafted, with real skill and a grasp of how a vulnerable sense of humanity can manifest in things dark and deadly, a story that surprises and delights, horrifies and entrances, and compels you to read without ceasing, at every heartrendingly intense and thrilling turn.
Writ large like a gothic fairytale draped in sorrow and hope, but filled with an intimacy of longing that comes from the protagonist who has long since given up expecting much from her voraciously dysfunctional family but clings to the ones she loves and who love her back, her gleefully idiosyncratic Nana, who owns Seaglass, the crumbling family home on its own island on the Cornish coast, and her sweet, kind, book-loving 15-year-old niece Trixie.
The invisible shipwrecks of my life are scattered all over this secluded bay with its infamous black sand. They are a sad reminder of all the journeys I was too scared to make. Everyone’s lives have uncharted waters – the places and people we didn’t quite manage to find – but when you feel as though you never will it’s a special kind of sorrow.
As for the rest of her emotionally blighted family who, by the way, pretty much ignore her these days after blaming her for one highly traumatic incident she wishes they could forgive them for, well, they don’t seem capable of loving anyone but themselves.
It’s a trial of messy disconnection and awkwardly expressed conditional love, assuming there’s any actual love at all – possible with the eldest of her two older sisters, Rose, but dubious at best in the case of her divorced parents Frank and Nancy and other sibling Lily who treat as an annoyance or distraction.
They certainly don’t seem to love her and if it weren’t for her Nana and Trixie, both of whom offer the kind of unconditional love that seems alien to the rest of her family and family friend/adopted son Conor Kennedy, Daisy, who suffers from a congenital heart condition that could kill her at any time and which makes any time she spends on this precious and hallowed.
So, why spend it with a family that seems largely indifferent to her?
That’s something Daisy keeps asking herself but in this instance, she fronts up at Seaglass because Halloween is her Nana’s birthday and she wants to be there for one of the few people in this world who seems to care if she lives or dies.
Strained though the event might be, everything seems to be going as well as expected until Nana makes an unexpected announcement, setting the cat very much among the familial pigeons.
While that might have been the end of that as everyone retires to bed, either furious and exhausted at the way in which the Darker family self destructs at the slightest provocation, what follows next is altogether far more terrifying as people start dying one by terrible one.
It’s like a twisted Agatha Christie-esque tale and it works superbly well, dancing like a figure macabre between the past and the present as the Darker family is forced to confront decisions made and consequences ignored and to deal with the fact that someone within the family, or quite possibly without, is out to do away with them and in one tense and fear-filled night.
Ramping up the tension even more is the fact that Seaglass is cutoff from the mainland for six or so hours every night, and there is no way for anyone to escape the home or the island and find sanctuary elsewhere.
They are effectively sitting ducks and despite every effort they make to stay safe and out of harm’s way, even locking themselves in the living room at one point, the body count keeps rising and a dark and twisted poem written on the wall, which lists all the family members and their perceived “sins”, keeps getting name after name crossed out on it.
An image of one of Nana’s birthdays here fills the screen, and I instantly remember that night sixteen years ago. It’s a night I’ve always wished I could forget.
Creepy? YES. Unnerving? ABSOLUTELY. Incredibly affectingly human? So much so that even as you race to figure out whodunnit and get swept up in the ever-building tension of an admittedly scary night full of dark and rain and the very real threat of characters you come to know very well (know yes, love not so much besides Daisy, Nana and Trixie) dying horribly, you still feel very much invested in the outcome.
So well does Feeney lay out the family’s pain and torment and their inability to fix what is very palpably broken – they are either poor parents or uncaring siblings or self-interested survivors of abuse and while you can empathise to an extent with them, at no point does anyone beside Daisy really deserve your unconditional love and approval – that while you are swept in the mystery aspect of Daisy Darker, and it’s impossible to sit idly by as events graphically unfold – there’s a real depth and emotional substance to every single page of this remarkably involving novel.
It’s a very rare thing these days to have a novel so consume you and take you by surprise that you scream in surprise as the big reveals happen but you will do just that in Daisy Darker which is astonishingly clever, movingly human and full of characters who may not all be the best people in the world but who, Daisy chief among them, will command your attention every step of the way in a novel that is never less than arrestingly, heartstoppingly brilliant and which is likely one of the best things you’ve ever read.