Looking Glass Sound Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
“I don’t remember writing this. Magic seems to be making its way into this book. Or maybe it started with magic, because there is a worse possibility than all of this. I’m not being haunted by a book. I’m in a book.”
Acclaimed author Catriona Ward’s most recent novel, Looking Glass Sound, is about murder, the deception, thievery, and magic in the art of writing, witchcraft, the horror of the ocean, and the bonds of friendship. Though at times confusing and slow to ramp up, I recommend this book to murder-mystery fans that want just a bit more horror than usual in the genre.
“There’s no such thing as an actual spell. Nothing ever works twice. They can tell they’re doing it right when the world goes all blue at the edges and sound drops away, and it’s just them, and whatever they’re focusing on. A bloody slip of paper, a piece of bark to which they’ve whispered a wish. Blood, mixed with the dirt from a girl’s shoe to make her get her period in front of everyone on the soccer field. Names written on a piece of paper with a date on it. Something bad will happen on that date, to that person. They don’t specify what. That’s up to the universe.”
Looking Glass Sound is actually three or four books rolled into one. The stories all recount the same things, but there are small differences that reveal point of view. While, yes, this can get a bit tedious at times (hence my saying “slow” earlier), the steady reveal, the pulling back of layers to find the truth, is alluring and satisfying.
Our main characters, Wilder, Nat, and Harper are friends who meet on the Maine coast as teens and who find themselves in the plot of a murder mystery with a local serial killer known as the dagger man. The kids stumble upon the bodies of the killer’s victims and everything about their lives changes. Wilder, turns out, wants to be a writer and decides to write about that summer, but his story is stolen from him— the beginning of another writer’s career, rather than his own. We begin to read excerpts from both the stolen story and Wilder’s version, following Wilder years down the road as he returns to the coast to finally write his book. But Wilder is haunted by, he eventually discovers, the characters from the stolen book— not the real people, but the fictional versions as written by the two writers. The books and reality blur and, the deeper you go, the more you start to wonder what’s real and what’s not. Ward takes you on a twisty-turny journey to reveal how stories capture people— trapping them forever. The mystery of the dagger man is but a thread in the larger narrative— the killer’s identity being revealed and re-revealed over and over again. In the end, everything you thought to be true isn’t, touching on how point of view radically alters reality.
Being critical, at times the constant reveals felt both confusing and tiring. But that’s just me and it’s why I’m not a huge fan of the genre. I gave this book a shot because it came up in my research of 2023 horror novels and I’m glad I read it. The book is probably clearer with a second read, knowing the truth all along. I’m never one to try to figure out the ending of a book as I’m reading it; I’m there for the experience. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I imagine I may enjoy the book more than I did the first time. Maybe this is one I’ll return to in a few years. Let it percolate.