Horror and Who Gets to Write It

Looking Glass Sound. Catriona Ward. 2023.

I didn’t mean to read another book by Ward so quickly, but I liked the last one enough that when it became available at my library I jumped on it. I’m glad I did, it’s another good one.

It’s a book that starts off as a thriller about a serial killer, and turns into a book about writing - and makes the change so seamlessly that you hardly notice it. Looking Glass Sound is a novel about who gets to own, and tell, and live in certain stories, and how losing control of your own story because someone else wants to tell it can either trap you, or free you.

Like Last House on Needless Street, the metaphors that Ward uses here are so obvious that you would roll your eyes but for how skillfully she constructs them. Someone is so tied to their traumatic story that they become literally trapped inside a book about it, and the very act of writing about someone else’s trauma is likened to murder or witchcraft. There’s a lot of discourse lately about the ethics of true crime media, along with the ethics of writing about the people you know instead of letting them do it for themselves. It is vitally important to all of the characters in Looking Glass Sound that they place themselves at the center of what happens to them, and that they be the ones to tell it and no one else. They each see themselves as the person the thing happened to, ignoring or overlooking how it seemed to anyone else. It’s suggested that telling your story can make it harder for other people to tell theirs; as if by defining the story for them you are cutting them off.

What I like about Ward is that she’s clearly working through these issues, which must be personal to a writer who deals with crime and criminality as much as she does, but she doesn’t answer any of the questions she raises - she just lets the ambivalence linger. I’m being very vague here, as I was about the other Ward book I read this year, because once again the journey of response Ward takes you on in this novel is a very deliberate one. This isn't a repeat though: Needless ends with a pretty clear judgement about who to sympathize with, but Looking Glass doesn’t. You can only really sympathize with the people whose voices are never heard, because they’re the only people who never try to take over the narrative at the exclusion of anyone else. It’s a bold thing for a novelist to suggest that the cost of certain novels might be too high.

Ward is very, very good. I’m going to keep reading her stuff.