Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Cherie Priest

The term "promising debut" is bound to crop up in at least one review of every first novel ever published. It's so painfully clich that it should never be used again. And thus I will cleverly get around actually using it in this review by just leaving it up there in the first sentence to ferment in the back of your mind.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is Southern Gothic passed through a filter of noir-- amateurs pressed into detective work, murky mysteries that have been lying dormant forever, prurient skeletons decaying in moldy closets, and guns. The overarching feature of noir was always that the hopelessness surrounding most of the characters (all of them, unless someone like John Huston got his mitts on the source material) was inextricably bound to the very air they breathed; no matter what happened, and how many rays of hope there were shining through the darkness, you could rest easy in your understanding that this would not end well.

Eden Moore knows very little about her family-- her father was long gone before she was born, her mother died in childbirth in an asylum, and she's been raised by a close-mouthed aunt. She does know, however, that she can see ghosts-- she calls them the Three Sisters, and has been able to see them as long as she can remember-- and that this sort of thing runs in families. It stands to reason, therefore, that after receiving a startling revelation during the trial of an older mentally unstable boy who tried to kill her, that she decides to shake the family tree and see what kind of strange fruit falls from its branches. That fruit is strange indeed, and gets stranger with every piece that falls out and smacks her in the head.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is good, solid work; there's nothing groundbreaking here, but there are some interesting variations on the themes. Priest has a fine eye for description, and a gift for turning it out onto the page; Eden poking around the half-torn-down asylum is as nicely rendered as any exploratory scene I can think of in a horror novel. Things progress as they should, rays of hope appear, and still you get the feeling: this will not end well. Satisfyingly, yes, but not well. That is what noir is all about.

Priest's second novel is scheduled to drop one of these days; I'm looking forward to it.