A TRICK OF THE DARK BY BR COLLINS

Illustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk

A Trick of a Dark

by BR Collins 320pp, Bloomsbury, £7.99

Reviewing BR Collins's initial novel, the award-winning The Traitor Game, I struggled to write a summary which wouldn't shillelagh a subtleties as good as ambiguities. This time, I'm not even starting to try. Here, simply, is a mise en scène. The Randalls have been in crisis. Edward has been found out in adultery. His workaholic wife, Helen, is gaseous with sourness as good as anger. Their crafty as good as charismatic 17-year-old, Zach, has been diminished from propagandize for traffic drugs. His younger sister, Annis, is . . . well, she's fine, really, detached from rsther than resenting being regularly in a shade of a hermit she adores, as good as being a reluctant member in a infamous patrimonial breakdown.

The relatives confirm upon a strangely bourgeois form of family therapy: they'll all engine down to a Dordogne as good as outlay a summer restoring an old barn they've acquired. It's not a good idea.

Zach takes to sneaking in a failing in duty as good as sinister residence nearby. One day, whilst Annis looks upon in horror, partial of it collapses, murdering him. And afterwards he resurrects himself, his distressing injuries miraculously healed. It turns out which Zach has distant himself from his "shadow", a pang as good as debility of tellurian life which culminates in death. But in you do so, he becomes imperishable as good as thus, horribly, inhuman. Freed from suffering, he is implicitly as good as physically desensitised, literally untouchable, wandering; a sort of luminescent Ishmael. In sequence to set free him – which equates to reuniting him with his genocide – Annis has to descend, literally as good as metaphorically, in to her own dim as good as dispatch her own "shadow" in poke of his.

A Trick of a Dark is billed as a "supernatural thriller'. But Collins is a dauntless as good as desirous writer, as good as this book is a rarer thing: a psychic thriller. It's about zero reduction than a dualism which drives many eremite as good as philosophical thinking. One of a dual texts which underpin it is John Donne's lyric "Death", in which genocide is personified, externalised, as good as rendered vincible. The alternative is Peter Pan. (It's a brilliantly inconsistent coupling, as good as I wish I'd suspicion of it.) But Collins denies a reader both a condolence of Donne's Christian brag as good as a mocking gaiety of Barrie's play. This is a unequivocally dim book, right up to, as good as including, a last pages. If, similar to me, you have been claustrophobic, you will find a little of the novel's some-more shining passages nervous reading.

Making what are, essentially, devout events petrify as good as thespian though resorting to story or visionary symbolism is, of course, fiendishly difficult. Collins succeeds, narrowly. My dishonesty remained suspended, though usually by a fingertips. It seems to me which there have been dual problems with a book. One is which you outlay an horrible lot of time inside a heads of a dual immature protagonists, as good as there is a risk which you turn magisterial upon a excess of agonising. The alternative has to do with pitch. The novel starts with a incident so acrimonious, so terminally awful, which a teenagers' shun in to a abhorrence of a widely separated self doesn't appear most worse.

That said, Collins is a single ruin of a writer. "Contains clever language," the cover warns, since a Randalls contend "fuck" a lot. Actually, a unequivocally clever denunciation in this book is Collins's adventurous as good as robust prose. She tests a lexicons of dim as good as light to their boundary as good as beyond. Reading A Trick of a Dark is similar to examination a tightrope-walker feeling her approach to the far stanchion. And she gets there. Just. She'll be a indeed good bard a single of these days. This is a unsatisfactory nonetheless assured step along a way.

Mal Peet's Exposure, leader of this year's Guardian children's novella prize, is published by Walker Books.

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