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Book Review: A very crooked tale

Christobel Kent's 'The Crooked House' is a brooding, convoluted story that gives new meaning to the phrase 'dark secrets'.

Saltleigh is a small, sleepy hamlet on a muddy creek in Essex. It's quintessentially British - cold, dank, dark, gloomy - and bears secrets only the resident townsfolk would dare to keep. In one way, the Saltleigh from Christobel Kent's latest novel The Crooked House is a lot like Edgar Wright's tiny village of Sandford in Gloucestershire from Hot Fuzz, only, less funnier, embarrassingly less quaint and a whole lot creepier. It's where Esme Grace, the novel's protagonist, buries her face in her pillow as she hears six shotgun blasts coming from below her upstairs bedroom in the old crooked house. Boom. Boom. Boom. A few minutes later, staggering through room after room, she's cradling the lifeless corpses of her sisters, brother and parents. And then she runs.
The 14-year-old Esme is taken in by her aunt Polly, who helps her to put it all away. The memories, the stories, the rumours, even the fact that her father - the lone survivor, barely, who's in a vegetative state after taking a shotgun blast through the face - remains the prime suspect in the murder of the Grace family. Esme, now the 24-year-old Alison, works as an accountant in the back of a small publishing house, far from Saltleigh, in the big city - London - where she can be Alison in body, mind and spirit. She's carefully built a life of secrecy in an attempt to hide her shattered past, but all that is going to come crashing down because of a wedding invite.
The details are scarce, perhaps indicative of the kind of relationship Alison shares with Paul Bartlett - a university professor 15 years her senior - but Alison finds herself inexplicably drawn to him. There's little conversation, and even fewer questions, which suits her perfectly. He later reveals that his parents committed suicide while he was in the house. That's your clue that you're in for one heck of a twisted story. And things couldn't get more twisted because now Alison is reluctantly going as Paul's plus one to a wedding. In Saltleigh. To the place she buried a decade ago. To the same pub her drunken father was spotted at before the murders. To the crooked house on the edge of the creek.
And if things couldn't be worse, the bride is Paul's ex - Morgan Carter; reviled by many, not the least, Alison.
As Alison is forced to reconcile with her past and reconstruct that chilling night - she still believes in her father's innocence - secrets start to spill out. Of course, she's operating under the pretext that no one has recognised little Esme Grace all grown up as Alison. But once the guise has fallen, the story takes a turn for a gripping and exhilarating read all the way to the end in a typical, pandemonium-at-a-wedding-style climax.
The Crooked House is no easy read; and it's not the topic, although it's deprecatingly dark. It's the writing style, which is convoluted, to say the least, with the author jumping around scenes randomly, and makes for a very disjointed read. It's a struggle to keep up, especially in the first few chapters. It's almost like reading a novelised version of Christopher Nolan's Memento. It can get quite exasperating towards the end as well, mostly because you're trying to piece together disjointed scenes and conversations to understand what is going on in the present - like a Family Guy episode full of cutaways. But if you can get past the abrupt storytelling, The Crooked House is definitely one dark, twisted and sordid read.
rohit@khaleejtimes.com