This debut looks back at a summer birthday party in rural New England in the late 1980s. The narrator, never named, is perhaps seven years old at the time, and part of a group of 10 cousins, “give or take”, who are left to their own devices as the adults turn inwards, talking about family troubles and controversies centred on the life of the grandmother, Beezy. We are in “horse country”: “split-rail fences and birch and pine woods and a few old houses landed like dice rolling way off the playing board into their own shaded grottos for ever”. The narrator recalls their part as the watchful child: the one who notices that adult conversation “just rowed across the surface” under which lie the mysteries that might shape a child’s life.
From an upstairs window the children see a large creature, “15 per cent bigger than a big cat”, moving rapidly from the treeline. While the kids are distracted, the youngest, Abi, who is three years old and has a broken arm in a cast, runs outside in pursuit and disappears. The eldest, Travis, who is 12 and Abi’s brother, leads them out into the strange world beyond the house to search for her, with awful and lasting consequences.
Bamford conjures, in vivid, amplified language, how children fluidly and unpredictably make sense of the world through the little that they know and the much that they see, unmoored from the rigidity of adult apprehension, so often trapped in convention and cliche. “The shadows of the house were the black sails of sailboats, meaning that the side of the house was the ocean’s surface and we were walking on the sky, maybe even along the horizon …” The child’s vision, shadowed as in a Grimms’ fairytale, comes through the adult narrator’s voice, suggesting that the grownup has not entirely left childhood behind.
Unguided and “alone at sea”, the children head into peril, where their mistakes begin to leave marks: “we were filled with dread topped with a scummy layer of remorse”. They look for adult help, only to come up against a “sturdy wall” of unnoticing. The children begin “tugging, whispering, whining”, but the grownups are “transfixed on the bright star of past transgressions and nothing we could do seemed to unfix them”.
The storytelling voice of the novel is not so much that of an unreliable narrator as an account of the unreliability, limits and instability of memory, of our versions of what happened and how we become who we are. In this way, Idle Grounds recalls not only the atmosphere of Robert Aickman’s strange tales but his observation that “Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.” It might be labelled for convenience as a gothic novel, and it has clear antecedents, not least in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but like all the best genre fiction it makes its own singular and potent space for the reader.
The novel is unsettlingly, sharply funny at times, with carefully built-up layers of dis-ease delivered in a comic deadpan; demonstrating, as the narrator observes, that “humour is braided with misfortune”. Bamford is clearly aware of what EF Benson knew, that the fear that takes hold in bright sunlight can be the deepest of all.
Stories of divorce and the disappointments of maturity emerge, along with a hazy account of the family house the narrator’s parents grew up in, in which all that went wrong with grandmother Beezy “had travelled backwards to infect all the stuff that had happened before, all the way back to their births and before that even, and everything tasted a little bit like sadness”. Bamford shows that what we do and who we are as adults makes the world in which children act and grow – especially those stories in our childhoods from which we have not escaped.
• Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
