In anyone else's hands, this might turn out to be a gripping but ultimately forgettable thriller. Frazier, however, is a writer whose spare prose paradoxically oozes atmosphere - you can almost smell the verdant pine trees and hear the crack of twigs underfoot. The history of the place - Cherokee Indians turfed out by Spaniards and then American settlers - wafts through, adding a richness and depth. Whether of landscapes, customs or people, Frazier's perception is acute: "The day the children came was high summer, the sky thick with humidity and the surface of the lake flat and iron blue. On the far side, mountains layered above the town, hazing upward in shades of olive until they became lost in the pale grey sky."
The similes are as majestic as the vistas: when Luce's old-lady friend sings songs of maidens being killed, "love and murder and possession fit tight against one another as an outgrown wedding band on a swollen finger".
Vulnerable children are notoriously difficult to portray in fiction without sentimentality or bathos. Frazier's stoical approach is dignified yet conjures up disturbing images. When the twins hide in a dangerous spot on the mountain where one step would hurtle them to their deaths, "the stuff they fear is unrelated to a hole in the ground ... The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you."
Some of the action seems designed with the celluloid incarnation rather than plausibility in mind - the serendipity with which love blossoms; the ease with which Bud procures a job as the dry town's procurer of alcohol - but Frazier is sage enough to cast a few obstacles in the way.
And beneath the chilling, photogenic story, the writing remains beautiful. A moment of quiet symbolism in the forest captures the heartless rules of nature in which the strong kill the weak at every level: "Under the hemlock, everything lies dark and quiet ... Listen hard and you hear a sound like the ticking of many wristwatches, the fall of dead needles, building in tiny increments a deep thousand-year bed to kill weaker things that try to grow underneath." Nature red in tooth and claw, indeed.
- INDEPENDENT
