For the lucky among us, life is what you make of it, but for Dixie Wheeler, the theme music for her story was chosen by another long ago, on the day her father butchered her mother and brothers and then slashed a knife across his own throat. Only one-year-old Dixie was left alive, infamously known as Baby Blue for the song left playing in the aftermath of the slaughter.
Twenty-five years later, Dixie is still desperate for a connection to the family she can’t remember, so when her childhood home goes up for sale, Dixie sets aside all reason and moves in. But as the ghosts of her family seemingly begin to take up residence in the home that was once theirs, Dixie starts to question her own sanity and wonders if the evil force menacing her is that of her father, or a demon of her own making.
In order to make sense of her present, Dixie becomes determined to unravel the truth of her past and seeks out the detective who originally investigated the murders. But the more she learns, the more she opens up the uncomfortable possibility that the sins of her father may belong to another. As bodies begin to pile up around her, Dixie must find a way to expose the lunacy behind her family’s massacre in order to save her few loved ones who are still alive—and whatever scrap of sanity she has left.
How could anyone read that synopsis and not want to dive right in? Granted, it’s one of those synopses that might be just a tad long, but no matter how many times I read it, I can’t decide which lines I would cut. It’s a synopsis designed to make you want to read the book—and read it I did.
Dixie is one of those characters who, no matter how much she annoyed me at times, I still found myself caring for. I think it’s fair to say she makes horrible decisions. I mean, who moves into the house where their family was slaughtered? Well, Trevor did it in Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite, one of my favorite books of all time—but that’s literally another story, so pretend I didn’t say anything about it. Dixie not only moves into this house, she ends her relationship to do it, and then starts decorating the house to make it look the way it did when her family was butchered. I think sanity is the least of her worries.
Dixie’s descent into an almost fugue-like state of madness is so gorgeously written that at no point was I able to look away or pretend that what I was reading was anything other than the story of a woman slowly coming apart, obsessing over her family’s horrific deaths. She was so lost in the minutiae of what happened that she—like me—didn’t really see the truth before it slammed into her face. I can only hope that now that she’s discovered the truth and faced it head-on, she’ll truly heal and be able to put the past—and her family—behind her.
No comments:
Post a Comment