Looking Glass Sound
Catriona Ward
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250860026
Tor Nightfire, August 2023, 352 pgs

Catriona Ward’s novel Looking Glass Sound straddles the genre borders of weird, horror, and mystery, but is entirely her own style. The novel takes readers through a strange narrative following writer Wilder Harlow as he tries to piece together a memoir of one dark summer of love and murder. In his youth, Wilder spent a summer on the Maine coast in his family’s cottage, where he met Nat and Harper, who became his only friends and confidants as a serial killer terrorized the shoreside community.

While writing his memoir, Wilder and the story begin to unravel. Strange visions plague him, and memories run away with him, creating a story within a story with word games that illuminate Wilder’s emotional state. Ward depicts all the joy, pain, and catharsis with a gentle but chilling hand that I couldn’t help but relate to Shirley Jackson’s style. Though the prose is simple, straightforward, the messages and depictions are heavy and dark.

Ward is probably one of my favorite writers of 2023. I read Looking Glass Sound right after finishing her novel The Last House on Needless Street. As with Last House, Ward sprinkles horrors both big and tiny all across the page, whether it’s the pictures an intruder takes, or the description of bodies being pulled from the water, and it all coalesces around an unnerving narrative. Blending terrors and oddities, Looking Glass Sound builds a tender and aptly drawn sketch of teenage summer-time feelings and the love that can build between a small group of teens.

Beneath the surface, Ward’s novel felt like a novel about the weave and web of relationships we make throughout our lives and how they change over time. Looking Glass Sound is a novel for readers who like novels with unique structures and mysteries that seem to unravel all the way up until the last page.