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nigellicus's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
5.0
Crying in the Dark was more problematic, but only in very small ways. Growing up, I had two sisters and lots of female cousins and we all got weekly comics from our parents. I hungrily devoured Battle and Warlord and Bullet and the Beano and the Dandy and the rest, and when I’d finished them I had no compunction about grapping Bunty and Mandy and Misty and reading them, too. Heck, I even read Twinkle until my sister got too old for it. Callow and all as I was, I soon came to recognise one common staple of the girl’s comic story: the saintly orphan abused by cruel relatives, the Cinderella story.
And here we have Elinor, living with her Aunt and Uncle. Bullied by her cousins, scapegoated by her Aunt, just plain ignored by her Uncle, life is tough. The sheer familiarity of the situation as ‘girl’s fiction’ grated a little, but this was amply overcome by Halam’s skills as a writer. As was the rather glaring coincidence upon which the resolution of the story hinges, grouch grouch. So Crying in the Dark isn’t quite so perfectly formed as Dr Franklin’s Island. But that was science fiction and this is a supernatural ghost story, so maybe standards are different…
On holiday in the country, Elinor begins to see visions of an old lady, hear the crying of a young child and has vivid dreams of the life of a serving girl. There’s a strange and tragic story here, one that leaks into the present and finds parallels with Elinor’s own life. She unwittingly makes a bargain with the evil to revenge herself upon her foster family, a deal she regrets but which she may be powerless to prevent. She is drawn deeper into the world of the past and the awful crime which she may be forced to re-enact.
It’s a wonderfully spooky read, and poor old Elinor’s psychological breakdown is quite compelling. Lots of great observational stuff and for all my complaints, the foster family are a wonderfully nasty bunch, not necessarily evil, just incredibly selfish. The historical mystery is sad and horrible and in the end, it was nothing at all like Twinkle.
And here we have Elinor, living with her Aunt and Uncle. Bullied by her cousins, scapegoated by her Aunt, just plain ignored by her Uncle, life is tough. The sheer familiarity of the situation as ‘girl’s fiction’ grated a little, but this was amply overcome by Halam’s skills as a writer. As was the rather glaring coincidence upon which the resolution of the story hinges, grouch grouch. So Crying in the Dark isn’t quite so perfectly formed as Dr Franklin’s Island. But that was science fiction and this is a supernatural ghost story, so maybe standards are different…
On holiday in the country, Elinor begins to see visions of an old lady, hear the crying of a young child and has vivid dreams of the life of a serving girl. There’s a strange and tragic story here, one that leaks into the present and finds parallels with Elinor’s own life. She unwittingly makes a bargain with the evil to revenge herself upon her foster family, a deal she regrets but which she may be powerless to prevent. She is drawn deeper into the world of the past and the awful crime which she may be forced to re-enact.
It’s a wonderfully spooky read, and poor old Elinor’s psychological breakdown is quite compelling. Lots of great observational stuff and for all my complaints, the foster family are a wonderfully nasty bunch, not necessarily evil, just incredibly selfish. The historical mystery is sad and horrible and in the end, it was nothing at all like Twinkle.
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