IDLE GROUNDS

First one, then a second child disappears during a strange, threatening family weekend in a New England landscape haunted by unquiet memories.

Glimmering with foreboding, Bamford’s debut is an eerie consideration of family secrets in a sun-dappled setting. The action is confined to a late-1980s summer day in the life of a group of relatives, accompanied by their partners and children, but the novel also reaches to the backstory as everyone gathers in Frankie’s house to celebrate a birthday. It’s a familiar setting to the family. Nearby is the home where Frankie and her four siblings grew up, and also the burned-out remains of their mother Beezy’s childhood house. Yet, to the next generation, a group of young cousins, this patch of horse country has suddenly become sinister. A zipping creature, a glutinous visual effect hanging over the forest, and terrified animals all spook them. When 3-year-old Abi goes missing, her brother, 12-year-old Travis, heads after her and vanishes, too. This leaves the other children searching the surroundings, hearing voices and seeing visions, reacting with childlike volatility. The parents, meanwhile, ignore them and bicker. The narrative is delivered in the confiding first-person voice of one of the cousins—“what you should probably know is that the day was bright and clean”—who’s looking back from adulthood, mixing the events of the day with speculation, suggestion, and glimpses of past familial discord, including some violence. The narrative is sometimes interrupted by “Intermezzos” telling various family stories, all threaded with a strange humor. The novel casts an atmospheric spell with its surreal episodes and hints of unhappiness, observed from the children’s perspective. Malignity hovers, events and artifacts are left dangling—a missing watch, a painted statuette, a pristine tennis court—and tragedy does eventually arrive. But the story concludes elsewhere, with the now-grown narrator still teasing its dark implications.

One family’s murky hinterland is evoked in modern gothic form. Curious and original.