Girl in the Corn

Jason Offutt’s unsettling novel shapeshifts between horror and fantasy and psychological thriller. It opens beguilingly with an encounter between a little boy and an apparent fairy – an encounter brushed off in the normal way by the boy’s reassuringly ordinary parents. But this little interloper, who crosses the boy’s path a number of times before her role in his life becomes clearer, is no cute Tinkerbell. She has an agenda. She has a mouthful of needle sharp teeth, a troubling smile and a readiness to ensnare a human child – or adult even – with fairy food made of poop. And it is an image of that smile that later adorns a number of hideous crime scenes, painted with childish fingers and human blood. But she is also, perhaps, the redeeming heroine of the story. Nothing here is quite as it seems.

I love the grand sweep of this novel as it traces Thomas Cavanaugh’s life from that first encounter in the cornfield through an adolescence tainted by mental illness into an uneasy adulthood. I love the way that that his life is interwoven with other lives, major or minor to the plot, but all of them full of depth and solidity uncompromised by the fantasy components of the story. The grounded reality of setting and characters is the perfect foil for the strange, disturbing fluidity of the plot and its troubling moral compass that lacks a true north.

There were aspects of this novel – its breadth and the enduring complicated relationship of its protagonists – that reminded me of Phillip Pullman. Something in its dangerous dabbling with Faery reminded me of Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market – another work that toys with childish imagery for adult purposes. But this dazzling eerie novel has no obvious parentage. It is a battle of good versus evil of course – which is the oldest story, surely, and the most fully-mapped in literature. That much at least makes the road familiar to the reader – but it doesn’t lead them back to any familiar hearth.