SOPHIE

From the British author of The Hole (2001): a first US appearance of a slim, taut, creepy psychological thriller, written when Burt was 19.

Mattie is five and his sister Sophie seven in Mattie’s earliest memories of their gothic English country-house childhood, at first somewhat normal in the telling, but not enough to hide the fact that something—or everything—is just not right. We see the young Sophie through Mattie’s eyes as he recounts key details from their closed and obsessively secretive world. And we see Mattie, in the present, through the eyes of the novel’s narrator as, one night some twenty years later, he struggles to address those memories. Mattie has brought “Sophie” to the now-abandoned house in which he grew up; tied up and helpless, she tries to understand the adult Mattie as he speaks, looking for any clue that might help her. Their mother was a shadowy presence occasionally erupting in towering anger, their father almost completely absent, though he does show up to impregnate his wife: the new little brother doesn’t last long. Sophie, frighteningly intelligent, has an unexplained hold over their mother, who seems to fear her; and that fear is somehow related to Mattie’s nightmares of a terrifying figure, Ol’ Grady, creeping into his room at night and of Sophie’s protecting them. Sophie works hard to conceal her intelligence from her teachers, but the other kids know she’s not like them. When two boys make the mistake of getting into a schoolyard scuffle with Mattie, Sophie displays an almost inhuman efficiency in getting rid of them. As Mattie’s memories approach the day when 13-year-old Sophie is to go off to boarding school and leave Mattie alone with their mother, the identity of the monster in the family becomes less clear, and his captive realizes she’s not the first “Sophie” to hear the story.

Slight and obliquely told, but dense with atmospherics and creeping dread.