Sometimes the scariness in a book lies in the uncertainty between what is real and what is imagined. A dark sense of dread pervades two of this month’s thriller offerings; the third is a rollicking but suspenseful story about, of all things, the illicit trade in rare birds’ eggs.
Your Steps on the Stairs
by Antonio Muñoz Molina; translated by Curtis Bauer
An unnamed man, recently relocated to Lisbon from New York, is waiting for his beloved wife to join him in their new apartment. “I’m using my time to make all the preparations for when Cecilia arrives,” he says. So begins YOUR STEPS ON THE STAIRS (Other Press, 298 pp., paperback, $18.99), an anxious, unconventional thriller by Muñoz Molina, a literary superstar in Spain.
The earth is getting hotter everywhere, and the narrator sees his new home as a refuge, physically as well as emotionally. “If the world is going to come to an end, there’s no better place to wait for it to end than here,” he says. He still hasn’t recovered — and who has, really? — from the trauma of being in downtown Manhattan during the attack on the World Trade Center.
As he falls deeper into his own mind, his unease fueled by the news, the internet and the books he’s obsessively reading, he begins to conflate Lisbon and New York, to lose track of where he is. Similarly, the past spills into the present.
Is it a coincidence that the absent Cecilia is an expert on how fear affects memory and a sense of time? “I have a good memory for things but not always in the order in which they happened,” he says. Maybe that’s why he never fully explains why he was summarily fired from his high-paying job. “Cecilia says that sometimes I lack the ability for self-reflection,” he says.
Reading this book, which has been elegantly translated by Curtis Bauer, feels like hearing a constant alarm ringing in a neighbor’s house. You’ll want to read the ending more than once.
Something in the Walls
by Daisy Pearce
Weird things are happening in the English hamlet of Banathel, where a teenager named Alice Webber might (or might not) be possessed by a witch. Her symptoms include vomiting up clots of hair, bile and sewing pins; making scary pronouncements in a guttural voice that is not her own; and being unusually attractive to wasps, whose carcasses litter her bedclothes.
There have also been some unexpected deaths, and a heat wave has made the neighbors irrational and suspicious. “Maybe the heat is melting our brains,” Alice’s worried mother, Lisa, says.
SOMETHING IN THE WALLS (Minotaur, 291 pp., $28) invites us to consider uncomfortable issues: the possible existence of the supernatural, the pathologizing of female adolescence, the interplay between fame and infamy — and whether the living can make contact with the dead. These questions are filtered through Mina, a newly minted child psychologist who comes to town to get to the bottom of Alice’s strange behavior but who is grappling with her own inner demons.
It’s hard not to feel uneasy as you read Pearce’s beautifully written book, which brought to mind the sort of creepy tales that used to thrill me as a child. The ending is both satisfying and not altogether definitive.
The Impossible Thing
by Belinda Bauer
Who wants to read a novel about the trade in rare birds’ eggs that thrived in England in the first half of the 20th century but is now illegal? Not me — or at least I didn’t until I encountered THE IMPOSSIBLE THING (Atlantic Monthly Press, 327 pp., $27).
This suspenseful, charming tale begins in Yorkshire in 1926, when young Celie Sheppard daringly plucks a guillemot egg — coveted by collectors for their unusual shape and gorgeous, unique shell designs — from the side of a cliff. It’s a blazing red, which makes it very rare, and it becomes the object of near-frenzied desire by collectors. It also pulls Celie’s family from poverty and provides her with a future she has never dreamed of.
Meanwhile, a different sort of drama is unfolding in present-day Wales. A local youth named Nick has just been robbed by a pair of nasty intruders in ski masks who tied him up and absconded with something from the attic: an old wooden box belonging to his father and containing, yes, a mysterious red egg.
How these two stories converge — or, more to the point, how one leads to the other — is the focus of Bauer’s attention. She is a sympathetic, playful writer, and she populates her book with as colorful an array of characters as you could hope for: intrepid climmers, as the egg-gatherers were called; unscrupulous and unhinged collectors; an obsessive museum curator; a gung-ho bunch from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
It’s very exciting, especially in the moments when seemingly downtrodden characters rise up to challenge the powerful. My favorite character, or at least the one I cheered for the most, was the guillemot. The book’s final moment belongs to her.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections. More about Sarah Lyall
The post Thrillers Suffused With a Dark Sense of Dread appeared first on New York Times.
