rachelmanija | Sundial, by Catriona Ward

Rob, a suburban mom with two young daughters, has problems. Oh boy does she have problems. Her husband Irving is abusive, her younger daughter Annie is fragile, and her older daughter Callie is showing signs of being a budding serial killer. When Callie tries to poison Annie, Rob takes Callie on a visit to her childhood home, which was a sort of scientific commune, where she hopes to do... something... to fix her.

The novel has four distinct narratives. One: Rob, in the present. Two: Rob, telling Callie about her own childhood (unsurprisingly weird and horrifying). Three: Callie, in the present. Four: Rob's unpublished novel, which is modeled on old-fashioned boarding school books but the characters have the names of her family and other people in her life, and the events are melodramatic horror.

I love this sort of thing if it's well-done and all ties together, and this is and does. Callie's sections are especially striking. Callie sees ghosts and talks partly in spoken emojis ("Red Face" for angry, "Champagne Glass" for party, etc). She is always accompanied by a ghost puppy that she may or may not have killed herself, and by a girl she calls Pale Callie - "pale" being her word for "dead."

In the present, Rob and Callie are locked in a psychological war, with Rob telling the story of her own life to try to explain things to Callie and also trying to understand Callie, and Callie suspicious of her mother's weird behavior and thinking Rob is planning to kill her. Rob is definitely doing some odd things, like digging a suspiciously grave-like hole in the backyard and throwing meat over a fence.

In the past, Rob and her fraternal twin Jack (both girls) are raised in a sort of family commune in the desert by parents who doing experimental behavior modifications on dogs that have become vicious due to abuse, to make them nonviolent again, via brain surgery and a genetic therapy they call "the click." Rob and Jack are extremely isolated and home-schooled, and don't interact with anyone other than their parents, a man living with them who's kind of a surrogate uncle, and a passel of grad students who make brief stays to help with the experiments. They're not allowed to read non-improving books, and so get obsessed with a boarding school book they find and read in secret.

This is an extremely dark, extremely well-written and well-constructed, and extremely bonkers book. It's hard to classify but contains elements of horror, science fiction, fantasy, Gothic, thriller, and family melodrama. The author calls it Grand Guignol, which should give you an idea of the tone and content. For the most part, it's very well-done and compelling; I gulped it down in a single evening and will seek out more of Ward's books. The central relationships, between Rob and Callie and between Rob and Jack, are heartbreaking in a good way.

But I am not kidding about dark. Let me provide some content warnings.

Content warnings: Serial killer-style small animal murder (off-page). Cruel experiments to modify behavior in dogs (on-page, a major part of the book). Bait worm maggots. Dead cows. Dead dogs. Ghost dogs. [rot13 for spoiler: TUBFG SRGHF]. Getting mauled by dogs. Child abuse. Dead children. Children in danger. Dangerous children. Miscarriage. Drug abuse. Mental illness. Domestic violence. Infidelity. Unfortunate implications about child abuse, mental illness, and fate.

This is another book where most of the discussion has to go under a cut as it has a lot of twists and revelations, most of which made sense, one of which is GREAT, and one of which is TERRIBLE.

There are a lot of layered revelations in this book, like unpeeling an onion. They're mostly very well-foreshadowed. There's so many I'm only going to get into a couple, but they're all related and cohere as a single story.

Rob and Jack were severely abused children that their scientist parents secretly rescued and informally adopted. (This is the summarized version of a very complex story.) Due to the abuse, Rob was violent and tried to murder people while still a very young child. To save Rob from becoming a violent sociopath and prevent the same from happening to Jack, the parents used the gene therapy they'd invented, "the click." This was meant to stop the violent compulsions. The experiments on dogs that had become vicious due to abuse were both meant to perfect and research the click, and to cover for the actual experiments they needed to hide, which were on Jack and Rob.

The click does work, but for some people and dogs it eventually fails, and they become violent again with extra bonus mental illness symptoms, like hallucinations and depression. This happened to Jack. Irving, a grad student at the time and and Rob's future abusive husband, gets both Rob and Jack pregnant, but Rob miscarries. (Not poly, he's a cheating asshole.) Jack has her baby, but Rob does most of the parenting as Jack's uninterested/incapable.

In a completely batshit yet fitting turn of events, Jack releases a dog for whom the click failed, and it kills the parents and Jack. Rob escapes with Jack's baby, Callie.

Rob takes Callie and pretends it's her own baby. Unfortunately, Irving knows Jack was the mother, and since Rob and Jack were fraternal twins, he could prove that he's the father and Rob is just the aunt. He threatens to take Callie away from Rob to make sure she'll never leave him.

And! This reveal is so nuts, I love it. Pale Callie isn't a hallucination, and she isn't a weird dark mirror of Callie. She is exactly what her name suggests: dead Callie. There are two girls in the book named Callie! Rob had named her fetus that miscarried Callie, then gave the name to Jack's daughter when she adopted her. Callie is haunted by her half-sister's fetus's ghost.

Please note the icon to this post.

This is my favorite revelation, which is only a twist because only Rob knew about miscarried Callie, and only Callie knew about Pale Callie, and Pale Callie didn't know who she was, so they only figure it out when Rob tells them the whole story.

The one twist that didn't work for me was also the only one which was left ambiguous in an irritating OR IS SHE??? manner. It's set up early on that 1) Jack and Rob are fraternal twins who look very similar but have different colored eyes, 2) Rob buys contact lens solution but (as far as anyone knows) doesn't wear contacts, 3) Callie puts these facts together and wonders if Rob is actually Jack.

I hate this twist because, unlike the rest of them, it makes everything that preceded it make less sense rather than more. If it's been Jack all along, then Rob's narrative has been lying to us/her/Callie all along and never stops lying, which is unlike everything else in the story where she's explained things as they came up or when she was ready to deal with them.

It also invalidates the reason why she's been staying in an abusive marriage. If she's Rob, then she did it because Irving knew he was Callie's biological father, but Rob is only her aunt, and so Irving could easily gain sole custody by doing a DNA test and suing, and he's been explicitly holding this over her. If she's Jack, then Callie is her biological child and there's no obvious reason why she'd stay with Irving.

In fact, it turns out that Rob has come up with an elaborate plot to kill Irving, which she ends up pulling off successfully, specifically because it's the only way she can get rid of him and still keep custody of Callie. If she's Jack, she could just get a divorce. I guess unless Jack delusionally believes that she's Rob? But then why would she know to wear contact lenses?

I'm going to assume Rob is in fact Rob, but it's very annoying that a twist that huge and also that terrible is the only twist that's left ambiguous, so you can go on thinking, "But maybe the whole book makes no sense actually!"

The ending is overly grim for my taste (as opposed to the rest of the book, which felt appropriately grim for the story.) It turns out that younger daughter Annie is the budding serial killer, not Callie; Callie knows this and has been trying to manage and protect her. By the time Callie confesses this, Rob (OR JACK???) has already destroyed the last dose of the click, because she thinks it's not worth trying on Callie given the chance that she will end up worse off than when she started.

But Rob and Callie love Annie, so they decide to devote their entire lives to trying to protect her and limit the damage she can cause. This is very well foreshadowed, though it has so many unfortunate implications about how the fates of kids are fixed if they're abused or "damaged."

The book ends with Callie realizing that Rob will probably die before her, so eventually Callie will be the only one standing between her psycho sister and the world, all alone. For me this takes the book from "dark" to "as they emerge from their separate concentration camps and joyously run toward each other, a cement truck's brakes fail and squashes his true love."

It's the total hopelessness that gets to me. Therapy and medication apparent don't exist or don't work, the damage of child abuse or the click is passed on genetically to the next generation, the thing that might have helped was destroyed, and after everything Callie and Rob went through, they end up exactly where they started, only with Annie instead of Callie. At least now Callie and Rob can commiserate until Rob dies of natural causes leaving Callie alone and they don't have Irving? BUT STILL.

That said, the rest of the book is really good. Take out out the stupid JACK OR ROB thing or resolve it to be Rob after all, and have them still have the syringe of click and the dilemma over whether to use it on Annie, and I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is okay with the rest of the level of darkness. Which, admittedly, is extreme. I will be surprised if anyone here reads it.

As it is, I recommend it with caveats for extreme darkness, a possible terrible twist, and an unnecessarily grimdark ending. But I have to say that I gulped down the rest of it, and there is a lot I didn't spoil since there are SO MANY batshit details I didn't even get into.

Cue every single comment being "I definitely won't read this book!"

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Date: 2022-04-12 07:52 pm (UTC)

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I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance

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