Wilder Harlow is a weird, lonely teenager when his warring parents bring him to a New England seaside town for the summer. There, he meets the best friends he will ever have, Harper and Nat; they spend their days swimming and boating, and talking about the mysterious Dagger Man who haunts the bedrooms of the town’s children at night. But as they swim, and fall in love, and dare one another, they discover a horror far worse than the Dagger Man’s shadowy presence – a murder that will follow Wilder for decades. “There’s a look in her eye like she knows, somewhere deep down, that her time will be cut short,” he says later. “It’s strangely common, I have found, with photographs of the dead. It’s there in their faces – what’s to come. But of course that can’t be true. It’s us who are left behind who see it. Who put it there.”
Looking Glass Sound (Viper), the latest thriller from The Last House on Needless Street author Catriona Ward, opens as a coming-of-age story told through Wilder’s unpublished memoir of his childhood. But it becomes something much deeper and stranger when we meet Wilder in adulthood and learn about stories layered on top of stories, horrors piled on horrors. Eerie and disturbing, it is another darkly atmospheric slice of the literary horror/thriller genre that Ward is making her own.
