A Good and Happy Child
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
George Davies has a problem: he can't bring himself to hold his newborn son. Desperate to save his dwindling marriage and redeem himself as a father and husband, George visits a therapist and begins to delve into the childhood memories that may be the root of his issues. Ten-year-old George, in the wake of his father's harrowing and unexpected death, is experiencing ominous visions - some friendly, others outright terrifying. Unable to control those visions, George starts to display erratic behaviour and eventually becomes violent. When a mysterious murder is ultimately revealed, the stakes are suddenly much higher for him and his family. Are the visions just the product of a grief-stricken child's overactive imagination? Symptoms of mental illness? Or is ten-year-old George possessed by a darker, more malevolent force?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This stunning novel marks the debut of a serious talent. Evans manages to take a familiar concept the young child haunted by a demon invisible to others and infuse it with psychological depth and riveting suspense. The setting alternates between George Davies's difficult childhood in Preston, Va., a small college town, after his father Paul's untimely death, and his equally challenging life as an adult and new father in New York City. Ostracized by his classmates and emotionally isolated by his mother, a struggling academic, young George begins to be visited by a doppelg nger, who, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, intimates that foul play was involved in Paul's death. When those visitations lead to violence, George begins receiving psychiatric treatment. Meanwhile, some of his late father's colleagues claim that demonic possession is a reality. Evans subtly evokes terror and anxiety with effective understatement. The intelligence and humanity of this thriller should help launch it onto bestseller lists.