Kathy O’Shaughnessy
Vanishing Act
Ever since Gillian Flynn’s bestselling Gone Girl, the words ‘psychological thriller’ have loomed large in writers’ minds. Emma Healey’s new book, Whistle in the Dark, fulfils the brief, but with an interesting twist. While Gone Girl was brilliant, but also nasty and fantastical, Healey’s book takes us into the world of a family we recognise. This is ordinary life gone wrong – a hell, in other words, to which we can relate.
At the beginning, Jen and Hugh’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Lana, is in the news. On an ‘art holiday’ with Jen in the Peak District, she goes missing for four days, before being found in the countryside, her sweater matted with blood, a gash on her scalp, strange marks on her ankles and her clothing wet, although it hasn’t rained. What happened in that time? ‘Nothing,’ she says to the police and her parents.
Before Lana went missing, she’d been depressed and was self-harming. Jen needs to know what went on so she can understand her daughter’s situation now. She suspects two people from the art group: Matthew, a boy
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553