Tessa calls him “my monster”: the man who, 18 years earlier, left her in a shallow grave with a corpse and a collection of bones, beneath a Texan field; the man who, to all intents and purposes, is now on death row, awaiting his imminent execution. Her testimony put Terrell Darcy Goodwin in jail almost two decades ago, so who has been planting clumps of black-eyed susans, the yellow American wildflowers that carpeted her “grave”, at her house ever since?
Julia Heaberlin’s third novel is told by Tessie (as she’s known when she’s a teenager), trying to come to terms with the 32 hours she can’t remember – “The things I do remember, I’d rather not. Four freckles. Eyes that aren’t black but blue, wide open, two inches from mine” – and by Tessa (as an adult), with a teenage daughter of her own. It’s a fairytale of a thriller, stalked by monsters and by the ghosts of the Susans – the dead girls – who still talk to Tessa.
“Snow White poisoned. Cinderella enslaved. Rapunzel locked up. Tessie, dumped with bones. Some monster’s twisted fantasy,” Tessa tells us. And: “I am the Cartwright girl, dumped once upon a time with a strangled college student and a stack of human bones out past Highway 10, in an abandoned patch of field near the Jenkins property. I am the star of screaming tabloid headlines and campfire ghost stories. I am one of the four Black-Eyed Susans. The lucky one.”
As a teenager, before she was attacked, Tessie was a track star, red haired and beloved. We see her in therapy, where she’s trying to face the unthinkable, terrified of the approaching trial, kept going by her best friend, Lydia. As an adult, Tessa is still unsure about the identity of her “monster”, still living in fear, still frightened for her mental state. “What was that Poe quote that Lydia liked so much? I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
She’s drawn into a last-ditch attempt to save Goodwin by his lawyers and begins to dig, tentatively, into her past. Revealing that three days after the trial ended, after Goodwin was locked up, a clump of black-eyed susans was planted by her window complete with a twisted version of an 18th-century poem – “Oh Susan, Susan, lovely dear... I never want to hurt you again/ But if you tell, I will make Lydia/ A Susan, too” – she starts to peer into her shrouded memories. Goodwin’s lawyers, meanwhile, are exhuming bones and employing cutting-edge forensics in an attempt to prove his innocence, and Effie, Tessa’s elderly neighbour, is complaining about a thief who she says is haunting the neighbourhood.
This is a novel replete with dread, whether for Tessa, fleeing her monster in the past and the present, or for Goodwin. Because it’s also an effective indictment of the death penalty, Heaberlin laying out the stark, appalling details that surround an execution – the campaigners, pro and anti, who stand watch outside, the grieving mother who raced to the morgue, “who hoped, for the first time in years, to touch the body of her son, a killer, while it was still warm”. Whether or not he’s innocent, we don’t want Goodwin to die.
Creepy and compelling, Black-Eyed Susans is a shadowy and crooked journey to a very dark place indeed, a twisty fairytale that deceives you just when you think you’ve cracked it and a thriller to make you remember why you love thrillers. Don’t miss it.
Black-Eyed Susans is published by Michael Joseph (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.39
