![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She is irritating, repellant and frustrating. The collective past of the Zetland family is not pleasant. What ensues is a slow unfolding, a game of seek with no hiding, the reader allowed to peak first here, then there, as the narrator reveals Marion’s foibles, and those of her brother, their mother and father. Burns makes a study of dark passion, but not the brooding malevolence of a serial killer, more the banal evil referred to by Hannah Arendt, one laced with pathetic and inane self-justifications. For Miriam, a sad-sack of a woman in her fifties, is as drab, anxious and miserable as they come. The is novel driven by its backstory, and amounts to a acutely observed character study of the protagonist, Marion Zetland, as she observes her brother, John, and his deviant habits. The Visitors is a grim read, more disturbing as the story unfolds, the narrative devoid of humour but not wit. A timid spinster in her fifties who still sleeps with teddy bears, Marion does her best to shut out the shocking secret that John keeps in the cellar.” “Marion Zetland lives with her domineering older brother, John in a decaying Georgian townhouse on the edge of a northern seaside resort. I’m only sharing some of the blurb as I think the rest is a spoiler. Catherine Burn’s The Visitors is one of those books. Psychological horror shades into dark fiction – bleak, gothic at times, often literary – and as ever, books can be hard to categorise. Good horror is an art form, one that requires considerable mastery and imagination. ![]()
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