When I finished The Loney I was thoroughly annoyed & felt that I’d wasted my time with a book that contrived to be a fast read that passed incredibly slowly. About three hours & a nap later what apparently had happened in the story jelled & I saw why one might compare it to The Wicker Man, as well as to some of the stories by Shirley Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft. From my current Christian perspective, this book is a story about two ways not to observe Easter: an extremely constricted & superstitious species of Roman Catholicism (which was already totally outdated in the 1970s when the principal action takes place) & an atavistic pagan survival which is cruel, messy & utterly ruthless. Guess which really works. With the Catholics you get simnel cake & a shrine of St. Anne with a magic well; the pagans make their most striking appearance as the Pace Eggers. I’d never heard of these before but found the Google images are priceless. The setting, in the neighbourhood of Morecambe Bay with its fierce and deadly tides, is wonderfully eerie too.

But there are huge defects as well. It is a tedious read & there are more loose ends than Penelope’s loom after she’d undone her day’s efforts. Just how did an American WWII army rifle find its way to an old house on the English coast, complete with ammunition? How did Hanny manage to load it without instruction & without ending up with a very sore thumb? Not to mention tossing it about as if it were a baton – an M1 weighs 9.5 lbs & is rather awkwardly balanced. An Enfield would have been a better choice, lighter, better balanced, easier to load & much more likely to be found in England. We are never told why the narrator’s parents are called Mummer & Farther & I kept wondering whether these were pet names or dialect pronunciations. In a non-rhotic London dialect I expect the former would sound to a North American ear like “mummah” but how would the latter sound different from usual? Also how could there have been a 300 year old shrine to St. Anne in England after the Reformation? There’s also a Catholic church with a frightening Day of Doom picture on the wall that’s supposed to have survived from the Middle Ages. Not likely.

So I give The Loney three stars, not because it’s middling, but because it runs the gamut from one to five back and forth so often the stars begin to twinkle. The Catholic characters are extremely depressing. It is hard to believe that Mummer is still under 40 & that Vatican II had occurred. She complains to Father Bernard – an Irish priest of somewhat liberal tendencies that he isn’t maintaining the standards of the sadistic & psychotic Father Wilfred. Once more I’m persuaded that the classic supernatural story does not work well at full length. (That may be one reason I’ve never become a fan of Stephen King & why I’ve bogged down on Sarah Rayne & F. G. Cottam.) At the length of The Lottery, Ancient Mysteries or Casting the Runes, pagan survivals work much better for me. But finding the Pace Eggers was worth the price of admission.

It was delightful to discover that Margo is a Swiftie, but Tarryn Fisher doesn’t tell us which of Taylor’s songs is her favorite. Often I thought it ought to have been “Mean”: “Someday I’ll be living in a big ole city”—Seattle, actually—“an’ all you’re ever gonna be is . . .” dead! Too seldom maybe “Safe & Sound” but “I Know Places” could be perfect for this girl on the run from a depressed & depressing dump of a coastal town in the Pacific Northwest called Bone Harbor, where Margo’s mother sells herself for $100 a pop. We 1^st encounter Margo when she is 13; by the end of Marrow she’s a 20-something who has left a trail of mayhem from Washington State to Florida. She is a most welcome new recruit to the elite squadron of young avenging kick-ass chicks: Alex in The Female of the Species, Lacey of Girls on Fire, Candice Fox’s Eden, & Tuesday of Tuesday Falling. Tuesday is probably the most comparable, especially when dispatching slime-balls who badly need killing, tho’ Margo’s a lot like Alex in taking care of business up close & personal. But as with Tuesday Falling, in Marrow the ultra-violence goes so OTT as not to gross out any but the more squeamish reader. With Tuesday it’s comic-book hero stuff, Margo’s is phantasmagoric. Long before she gets her psych evaluation (really!), you may start suspecting you’re in the hands of an unreliable narrator. So watch out!

As with Tuesday, I suspect we want to stand up & cheer for Margo because we feel society hasn’t lived up to its implied bargain with us. We give up our right to defend ourselves & to exact retribution to the state in exchange for protection against killers, rapists & thieves, protection the state fails to provide. Margo frequently questions herself, fearful that she has morphed into a murderer & monster. When I was her age, I might have been similarly confused between the demands of legality, morality, & spirituality. But she (& if I’m reading her right Dr. Elgin her psychiatrist) has an inkling of what is actually happening with her. What in the 18^th century would have been called her “moral sense” takes possession of Margo, so she has no choice but to act & to exact retribution, especially from those who prey on & abuse the weak, innocent & helpless. Personally I’d go with Greek tragedy. As Margo develops as a revenger a terrible daimon emerges, an Alastor or Erinys ultimately merging with Margo’s essence. Like in Greek tragedy, the daimon has a literal local habitation, appropriately termed “the eating house”!

If you know an on-line book club doing a group read of Marrow, do let me know. I’d so love to discuss it with others, & I doubt that any two readers will completely agree about what is going on with Margo, Margo’s state of mind, the other characters & even their status. What is supposed to be real & what is imaginary? This is a story that will challenge you on every level—literal, political, psychological, moral, symbolic & whatever you think of Margo (& frankly I thought she’s to die for), you’ll not forget her.

Oh, & maybe Taylor Swift & Ellie Goulding singing “Burn”!