SUNDIAL, an oddly innocuous title for an anything-but-innocuous read

SUNDIAL
CATRIONA WARD
Tor Nightfire Books
$26.99 hardcover, available tomorrow (pre-orders today, of course!)

Rating: I settled on four; YMMV

READ HER INTERVIEW IN The Guardian!

The Publisher Says: You can't escape what's in your blood...

All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind.

She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.

Callie is worried about her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely, and speaks of past secrets. And Callie fears that only one of them will leave Sundial alive…

The mother and daughter embark on a dark, desert journey to the past in the hopes of redeeming their future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Y'all remember how I said I wasn't a member of the Cult of the Mother? Rob, the mother at the center of the pitch-black exploration of the Dark Heart of Motherhood, isn't a big fan of it either. And she, stupid asshole that she is, had a second baby with a man she dislikes despite the fact she doesn't like the one she already has.

So why the ever-lovin' hell did I keep reading the book? And what's that star rating up there all about? I can (sort of) explain....

I hate fewer tropes more than the Noble Woman Who Keeps Her Family Together™. This is that story. And I hate that about it. I'm not interested in reading about the vileness of animal experimentation. This is that story, too. I really, really do not like to read Exceptional Child narratives. I don't really need to say it again, do I? But once you open this story up, you're In It For The Duration. Believe me when I tell you, you're not going to come out the other side the same as you went in. Rob is really a bad, bad mother in that she became one at all, ever, after what her childhood was like. It's inevitable that very bad things would follow this woman around like roast-beef-and-brussels-sprouts farts. And yet her narrative voice never does the inexcusable and becomes whiny. She gets closest to it when she discovers that her best friend isn't. But even then, very early on, her tone is "goddammit! not a-fucking-gain!" instead of "how could this happen to meeeeee?" which last is the norm for most women's fiction/domestic thrillers I've perused.

It's what occurs to bring the matter to her attention that needs to be praised: Her youngest child contracts chicken pox. There is only one plausible way that could have occurred. And that, as the saying goes, is that. What matters as we go forward is what Rob is going to do about the stuff she learns: fix it. Every weird, unbelievably wacked out thing Rob does throughout this weird, wacked out story is aimed at fixing the problems she's got in her face right this minute. And it takes her less time to figure out what she has to do to have the best chance to fix it than you'd think, looking at the page count.

Not a one for deep self-reflection, our Rob. Had she been so equipped, there would've been no marriage and no children in her life. And believe you me, there should NOT HAVE BEEN.

So why were there a marriage and children in her life? Because...there are debts that one repays whether in this or another life, there are things that are absolutely yours and yours alone to atone for and to offer up to the evil life-force that this world was created to sustain. And that is where Rob and Callie are as this story begins its uphill climb against the gravity of reality.

When you start out a read as addictively written as this one is, you accept that there are things you won't like as much as others in it. Because something is marketed as horror, you know you're going to have to accept a certain level of gore, for example. The question is will you be too squicked to take the gore as it's intended, or will it just lie there on the book's floor waiting for the cleaning crew to make it all go away? This book seriously skated on the edge of calling the crime-scene cleaners as we got more and more into the scenes in the desert. I wasn't at all sure continuing was a good idea at multiple junctures.

I persevered, and despite the feeling that there could've been less of some gory moments, the fact is that the gore here is handled with deft assurance, and is applied to the plot with a care that one senses even as it deepens about one's ankles. The moments when the plot takes the path of least resistance, ie "it's the man's fault," there is in fact something more to it than that. There is a dark, echoing justice in the world the book creates, a seriously ugly but still urgent weighing of karmic scales that must happen to give this ending, any ending really, a hope of satisfying the reader.

The latent genetic flaw, or the generational trauma inheritance, or the epigenetic expression of ancestral agonies that come to the fore in the read are utterly predictable from the moment we meet Rob. But there's the small matter of how Author Catriona Ward writes to explain why one is compelled to keep reading on. It is this fact that caused me to power through very, very, very upsetting events that would normally have caused me to shut the book for good.

I don't think too terribly many of my regular readers are in it for horror reads. If that's you, skip this review. But horror people should, if they have not already, make this author welcome on their shelves. She's a good sentence-by-sentence writer, and while I'm not the most familiar with horror plotting, this story's absence of supernatural falderol accentuates the truth that I appreciate horror stories making plain: Humanity is made up of vile, irredeemable scum who, even when they say they're doing something for "the greater good" or whatever, are actually just looking for ways to excuse their inner cruel bastard coming out.