THE LOCKTENDER’S HOUSE

An IED explodes in Iraq killing a young private. Back home in North Carolina his girlfriend suffers collateral damage.

In the latest novel from Sherrill (Visits from the Drowned Girl, 2004, etc.), Janice Witherspoon, startled from sleep by a strange noise in her Greensboro apartment, succumbs to a migraine before she discovers what the noise was: Her boyfriend’s banjo slipping from its wall hook and crashing to the ground. Two days later, after enduring a siege of migraine-induced hallucinations and pain, she learns that Private Danks died in Iraq at exactly the same time his banjo fell. This is the first of many coincidences that lead Janice from her safe but staid existence as a customer-service operator to an isolated sojourn in rural Pennsylvania. Distraught by news of Danks’s death, Janice decides—or did a voice compel her?—to go see his body when it arrives stateside. A series of missed exits, wrong turns and scary strangers delivers Janice, who refuses sleep because her nightmares are so frightening, to the titular locktender’s house: a relic of a historic system of locks and canals that facilitated lucrative inland trade until locomotives rendered it defunct. Without money or any idea why she is there, Janice moves in, subsisting on homemade preserves she finds in the house until a reclusive sculptor discovers her and offers food, supplies, friendship and yoga instruction. Another local, the dulcimer-playing Addie Epps, keeps Janice company when the sculptor is not around. As her nightmares—unspecified imagery that suggests rape and other horrors—spill into Janice’s waking consciousness, the third-person narrator loses any semblance of objectivity and reveals only what Janice, in her spiraling confusion, perceives, none of which is reliable.

What begins as a promising psychological portrait of a troubled woman becomes an overwritten gay ghost story replete with off-stage S&M and a deus ex Macintosh, among other unconvincing story lines.