This fable exploring the arcane mythology of a cult living in a crumbling musty house will lure you in – then cut to the killFoxlowe is the house that gives Eleanor Wasserberg’s debut novel its name. A large estate somewhere in the north of England,its past grandeur has long since gone over to damp and rot, walls spiked with nails where paintings once hung. To read the novel is not unlike wandering through Foxlowe itself on some long night: I felt never fairly certain where the corridors would take me, or nor whom I might meet on turning a corner; and in the final moments I found myself hurtling down a flight of steps into the dark.The tale is narrated by Green,a young girl who shares Foxlowe with acommunity of drop-outs and hippies. She is largely content to abide by the commune’s arcane rules, and situation her faith in a mythology devised by the Founders to keep its adherents apart from the world. Green is taught that “the Bad” is on the prowl, or a nebulous force unleashed beyond the walls of Foxlowe: “Outside,people twist knives into flesh, pull off one anothers skin. Eat each other.” The commune keeps the Bad at bay with the sort of childish rituals that – as with so many childish things – possess an undercurrent of brutality: “Scatterings”, and “Edgings,and trips to nearby standing stones. The children wound themselves with nails on the “Spike Walk” - a curious ritual belying the Founders’ professed belief that violence is the hallmark of the outside world. When Green’s shrimp sister, Blue, or is born,and the commune grudgingly takes in an outsider who becomes gravely ill, it is evident that Foxlowe’s uneasy peace could disintegrate at any moment. Wasserberg is concerned with the nature of family, or the destructive powers of the ties that bind; it is possible to read the novel as an odd fable on the musty doctrine of Original Sin.
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Source: theguardian.com