Sundial by Catriona Ward

I would like to thank Viper Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Viper Books

Published – Out Now

Price – £14.99 hardback £4.74 Kindle eBook

Warning – This tale does have scenes discussing animal cruelty and child abuse.

You can't escape the desert. You can't escape Sundial.

Rob fears for her daughters. For Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. For Annie, because of what Callie might do to her. Rob sees a darkness in Callie that reminds her of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to Sundial, her childhood home deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.

Callie is afraid of her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely. To tell her secrets about her past that both disturb and excite her. And Callie is beginning to wonder if only one of them will leave Sundial alive...

I think creating a feeling of dread is a really important part of good horror. You go into a house and strange things happen is just weird. If you are told the house, you are about to go in is known for inexplicable scary phenomenon then you can already feel your heartbeat faster and the hairs rise on the back of your neck before the front door even opens. As a strange scientist once said it is all about antici…..pation. In Catriona Ward’s splendid new novel Sundial, we get a family on the edge of disintegration wrapped with the tale of two young women in the desert living a very unique existence.

Rob has two daughters with her husband Irving. They live in a pleasant middle class home; have respectable outward lives and from the outside all looks very normal. However, Irving has a history of infidelity; Rob and Irving constantly row and get to the edge of violence; Rob’s daughter Annie is very ill and fearful while the older daughter Callie is obsessed with murder, talks to mysterious ghosts and their behaviour is getting worse and worryingly Rob is shocked to find some very disturbing artwork in her room. Rob is concerned that her family history is about to repeat itself. Rob takes Callie to Sundial out in the desert her family home and where so many secrets have been buried but it is now time to both tell her own story to Callie and decide what must be done about her alarming daughter while Callie grows increasingly fearful that her mother is now very dangerous and there is no one around to save her but herself.

Sundial is a masterclass in weaving two compelling stories together to create something truly special. In our present it’s the toxic atmosphere of Rob’s modern family that starts the novel. Under the veneer of a well to do family we soon feel the family on the edge of something terrible erupting be it Irving’s temper, Callie’s escalating and worrying behaviour or Rob’s increasing urge to do something she may regret. The reader very much can sense the brittle glass under the feet in these early scenes. Then we quickly get to Sundial and in this strange isolated home with the graves of her parents and many dead animals around her she tells Callie of her childhood we get a haunting family mystery as we find Rob had a twin sister named Jack. They lived with their parents Falcon and Mia plus many animals all of whom are buried around them. The family worked with animals for various experiments, and we soon realise this story sounds a little too good to be true. What are the experiments? Where is Jack in the present and why do the facts not add up? Here we get a rapidly disintegrating sister relationship where the two often felt they were each other’s world and now each starts to think about escape which neither can fully let the other move on from. There is a constant sense of a soon approaching tragedy in both plotlines and the sense that the past definitely influences the future – the question the story asks is how?

Fear not I am not going to tell you gentle reader! What I can say is that Ward uses Rob and also Callie as her primary narrators of the story in the past and future. Rob as an adult, a teenager and Callie as a bewildered and disturbed teenager trying to make sense of her family and her won worldview. We sense both have secrets and only through the story’s progression will these finally come out. We know the answers will not be good and the sense both of them holding back their emotions makes you sense something will soon erupt. Ward uses little repeating motifs to show the links in the story and also starts to twist them as the story darkens. A night-light, a little coyote pup found in the desert, secret messages recorded in the bit of an apple; and we even have small interludes of Rob’s boarding school fan fiction stories that use some increasingly familiar names that when it all comes together to create a strange dreamlike reality that feels on the cusp of turning into a nightmare as these signs mean different things. The central theme is do our childhoods forever haunt us in our actions? We clearly can see terrible things are coming we just don’t know what and in this very well paced tale we sense its not far away. That what creates the sense of dread as I didn’t know which character I can trust and what am I not yet seeing but is making feel quite uncomfortable.

There are little lines that suddenly make you feel the step you were about to tread on has been removed and you’ve just gone too far to stop… It’s a deliciously wicked piece of guiding the reader into the maze and suddenly you realise you are definitely not where you thought you were anymore. Thriller fans will love the tension and dark family secrets while those who enjoy speculative fiction may eb able to read the story in slightly different ways. Both will hugely enjoy it once their pulses come down. The way is all clicks together in a different picture to the one I originally expected but equally worrying was both dark and magnificent.

Sundial is like a tale being whispered to you by various characters over a campfire in the desert. The kind of tale that makes you increasingly aware you’re now sitting in the dark miles from anywhere and you don’t really know who these people are anymore nor what they plan to do once the story ends. It cements Ward as one of the most interesting dark thriller writers around and definitely one of this year’s best reading experiences. Hugely impressive and I strongly recommend it