An unsettlingly funny debut explores memories of a perilous birthday party, with dark echoes of Grimms’ fairytales and gothic fictionThis debut looks back at a summer birthday party in rural New England in the late 1980s. The narrator, never named, is perhaps seven years old at the time, and part of a group of 10 cousins, “give or take”, who are left to their own devices as the adults turn inwards, talking about family troubles and controversies centred on the life of the grandmother, Beezy. We are in “horse country”: “split-rail fences and birch and pine woods and a few old houses landed like dice rolling way off the playing board into their own shaded grottos for ever”. The narrator recalls their part as the watchful child: the one who notices that adult conversation “just rowed across the surface” under which lie the mysteries that might shape a child’s life.From an upstairs window the children see a large creature, “15 per cent bigger than a big cat”, moving rapidly from the treeline. While the kids are distracted, the youngest, Abi, who is three years old and has a broken arm in a cast, runs outside in pursuit and disappears. The eldest, Travis, who is 12 and Abi’s brother, leads them out into the strange world beyond the house to search for her, with awful and lasting consequences. Continue reading...