After a curtain-twitching cul-de-sac, a Preston shopping precinct, and the Church of the Latter-Day Saints brought to Lancashire, Jenn Ashworth ups sticks for the seaside in her fourth novel. Set in the determinedly genteel resort of Grange-over-Sands, just across the bay from Morecambe on the Cumbrian coast, Fell is a disturbing, precisely rendered tale of charisma, misplaced faith and transgenerational trauma, with a touch — not too heavy-handed, fortunately — of the supernatural.
This is the same part of the world as that of Andrew Michael Hurley’s gothic prize-winner The Loney, and both novels make great use of the treachery of the tides, the beaches that can disappear beneath the water in an instant, as ‘gullies and channels shift’, and ‘the sands run like mercury: no one can trace the same path across them twice’. But Fell also brings to mind the claustrophobic, suburban world of Dennis Potter’s great play Brimstone and Treacle, in which a devastated and vulnerable household is breached by a mysterious, sexually charged stranger.
The house in this case is The Sycamores, home to Jack and Netty Clifford and their daughter Annette, still a child but intensely alive to the encroachments and silences of her mother’s terminal illness.
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