Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

I would like to thank the author for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Wildfire

Published – Out Now

Price – £20 hardback £9.99 ebook

Something terrible has happened.

In a mysterious apartment filled with ghosts, our unnamed narrator attempts to explain this to her child - how do I talk about this? she wonders.

The truth must become something beautiful. We must begin with a fairy tale.

And so she begins to construct a beautiful fairy tale for her child - one that begins with a strange baby boy whose nails grow too fast and whose skin smells of soil. As he grows from a boy into a man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Tragedy strikes in cycles - and wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. These ghosts call out desperately to our narrator as she tries to explain, in the very real world, exactly what has happened to her.

And they all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin:

If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

The fairy tale while supposed to delight the children has long also been seen as a way to caution them. Be kind, respect your parents, honour the future husband and many more messages useful to life long ago are hidden (not always subtly) into them. As the years pass, they’re has been a re-examination and re-interpretation of these key stories. Many have moved towards highlighting the way women are treated as second class to men and without agency of their own. In Natalie Theodoridou’s brilliant dark fantasy Sour Cherry the cautionary aspects though are used to underline an old tale’s darkness and horror to also remind us that some monsters still hide in plain sight.

As the ghosts gather in a room a mother decides to tell her son a story that may very well be true. Long ago in a far away place a young woman called Agnes was summoned to nurse the Lord’s new son. A son who grows into having competing natures of kindness and cruelty. Bad things follow him and as he grows, his beard is so dark it can appear blue and he moves around the world he marries his devoted wife, has a son of his own and tragedy follows and more pain and eventually the man chooses another wife, then another, then another….

If Angela’s Carter short tale The Bloody Chamber turned the tale of Bluebeard into how women can be empowered to take control of a situation, then here Theodoridou has focused on exploring how Bluebeard can also be used in the twenty first century to explore themes of domestic abuse. It is an excellent mix of dark fantasy and horror that makes us the reader bear witness a monster grow up, crucially understand why characters’ certain choices were made but most of all realising that choices were still made to do this to women and that some nightmares are very hard to leave. A bit like the many ghosts that start to haunt the novel we can but watch, we cannot act but importantly we can learn.

The first third feels far older fantasy in the classic style with castles, lords and villages. We think Agnes may be the main character as he looks after a young boy his parents seem not to love. The boy has a nature that seems cruel and possessive, and Agnes encourages him to start making friends with the village. But there are undertones that this is not going to be happy tale. Agnes’ own relationship causes jealousy, and this young boy seems to be able to corrupt nature in horrific ways…or it could just be coincidence. We watch the boy even start to fall in love with one of the young villagers. But at the same time the son and father start to come into conflict which ends bloodily. The boy who is becoming a young man is capable of love and violence which will become a feature of his life and for all those he meets. There are times we think we can nearly be sympathetic as we understand his situation and indeed a tentative romance that develops between the lord and a male shopkeeper adds a further complexity of how this cycle be stopped before its too late. Instead, soon tragedy comes again and again.

Our lord’s own life gets complicated with the arrival of a son of his own and then Theodoridou suggest we may instead have a tale of the good son taking on the evil father to protect the mother. We follow his rise, his own understanding of his father’s personality and their inevitable confrontation. More pain will follow. At times Theodoridou reminds us that this tale is a tale where the modern-day world is just to the left if it. We start to wonder why our narrator is telling this not at all comforting tale to her son. What clues may be lying in the story to make things relevant. Is this going to be a tale of how stories can give people confidence to face their fears?

The final acts of the book are harrowing. How our lord ‘loses’ a wife, replaces her, then loses a wife to be replaced. How a man can be charismatic, entrancing and then very hard to leave when you’re in his power. If this is a story where we expect the inevitable heroine to rise, we are being kept waiting. Just as much as there is power in stories to say you can get out of horrific situation there is also a valid purpose in a story reminding us that not everyone can be so lucky to get themselves out of it before if you don’t recognise the signs of the trap. There are things we should be on the lookout for, how these men select the people they can manipulate, entrap and abuse. Our modern narrator and the wives are echoing each other, in fact time appears to be moving up in the story towards the modern day, all revealing their long-hidden secrets and sharing the paths they all seem to have trodden. The story is not comfortable, but we are being made to look, that our wives are aware that this man seemed to have other relationships is a scary insight but how many times have we not heard that a woman felt this time it could be different and this time everyone would be happy. This novel warns us that may be the most dangerous fairy tale of them all. At one stage Theodoridou just stops telling us the wives’ tales we are just told thee is another, then another then another like brutal short news clips statistics the cycle just goes on and on almost losing us in horror as each death becomes routine. It is a chilling but very effective device.

Sour Cherry is a mesmerising read. The old world of fairy tales mixes with our world and we should see the echoes with so many tales of domestic violence we will see and continue to see on the news today. We may get to understand the man behind the monster, but we don’t pardon them for their choices. We may not be able to cheer the wives on as heroines, but we still get to see them as women being abused and losing their sense of agency in a man’s constant control in a world with little help available for them. This is not a comforting read it is though I think a necessary and powerful one. It is strongly recommended