The Dark King Swallows the World (Radiant Press)
by Robert G. Penner
This book is an exploration of a neglected American 12-year-old girl, Nora. She was a precocious and very bookish young lady whose British mother lived to be adored. After Nora’s father died in WWII her mother, selfish and vain, had a series of lovers—a situation that left Nora with her odd relations and her mother’s friends outside of London during the bombings.
Nora didn’t mind all that much; she had her books, her morbid imagination, and perhaps a second sight into the spirit world (and I must say it was a pleasure to read an unreliable narrator who knew herself to be unreliable!) When her mother made what looked like a lasting attachment to the artist Charles, Nora, despite being with her mum, was further shunted about as she was somewhat of a third wheel on their trip to Cornwall. A fourth wheel at first but her baby brother was killed in a car crash, which started a downward spiral in her mother and Charles’ life where they all but forgot Nora in their grief.
Again, Nora—who by this time was rather used to raising herself—didn’t mind. She made a new friend, a green-eyed and red-haired girl named Tressa, and they went exploring in impossible places where you wondered if these were Nora’s imagination again or things from arcane realms. The various distracted adult guardians were no help; they
merely fanned the flames of her overactive imagination…or were the tales they told about ancient things that linger in the hills and watercourses of Cornwall actually true? And how did the elusive fox, that may or may not be Tressa, and how did her departed brother figure into all of this?
In her grief about Nora’s brother’s death, Nora’s mother all but leaves Charles for a man who is bound up in the spirit world: Mr. Winter. In the guise of helping her with her grief, Winter pulls Nora’s mother further and further into his occultist practices. In investigating her mother’s obsession with Mr. Winter, Nora “sees” a fox in a cage and learns that her brother is not entirely dead and goes about trying to rescue him.
This novel has a dream-like tone that never degenerates into a fog, but is rather a cohesive set of misty clues and hints that pulls you right along. I enjoyed it very much.
Wendy S. Delmater