A widower and his young daughter live in a hillside cottage. Interspersed between the increasingly dark events of their life are vignettes of historical scenes from the area’s past: moments of violence, trauma, and death, whose actors and events feed into each chapter.
The girl, Nia, has a powerful imagination, which seems capable of dissolving the temporal distance between the historic events and those of the present. Her father joins in, calling it “a game, really, a kind of play, during which our sense of reality would loosen.”
Like the stories in Tim Cooke’s previous collectionWhere We Live, in Dark Play there are no easy, tied-up resolutions. Cooke’s writing is all about the spaces in-between, and there are many: information is subtly withheld here, an explanation endlessly deferred there. Stories end – sometimes with a climactic moment of horror – and the next one doesn’t provide any clues as to what’s happened in between, nor mention the events of the story before. Some readers may find this frustrating, but the stories have enough of a hook to pull you back for a re-read. Some of the mysteries feel almost within grasp, like the sense of a dream.
Of course the biggest and most significant space is that of the girl’s mother, Bethan, whose absence haunts the book and the lives of her family. She appears in the collection’s final story which comes, chronologically, before the rest of the book and thus gives the collection a circular form. However, it doesn’t entirely “explain” things, because the girl’s imagination and her experiences are themselves a root cause of the climactic events. So, in a repetition like this, where and how does any new element enter? Are the tales, then, a spiral, screwing deeper and deeper into the dank hills and woods of this remote countryside?
There’s a further subtle touch in that the present-day stories are told in the first-person by the girl’s (unnamed) father. By definition such a narrative voice is unreliable, and this adds an extra layer of distance between the reader and the girl’s imagination: how far can we trust what her father is telling us?
It was only on a re-read (the penny took a while to drop, if I’m honest) that it dawned on me that Nia is not alone in her games. Her father often plays, too. The games can lead to moments of panic and terror – “I felt suddenly disorientated, stranded between two worlds” – or involve other people as unwitting victims, but we never see the consequences, because the next story moves on without reference to the one before. The idea that both may be playing – and everything that happens is part of their dark play – makes this a far darker book than on first reading.
This unsettling collection is short – fewer than 80 pages – and the latest in Salò press’s ‘Flirtations’ series of chapbooks. It’s a lovely little thing, with a nice wraparound Breughel (The Triumph of Death) on the cover to get you in the mood. Recommended.
My copy was supplied for review.
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Into the Gyre 