Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns

An arresting first line. Poison in the plot. Corpses and survivors. Mice in the graves. It’s another twisted gem from Barbara Comyns.

Something sinister lurks within her prose, grabbing you when you least expect it.

One morning a great flood disrupts the Willoweed family. A peacock drowns, the hens are suicidal, and nasty Grandmother smacks the maids and children with a carpet beater. Young Emma dreams of shapely nails, pretty dresses, and escape. Father dreams of escape too. They all do, and yet Grandmother has them all knotted and cowering at the ends of her apron strings. But worse is to come: strange deaths plague the hysterical village. Can the Willoweed’s escape the madness?

As always, Barbara Comyns packs a lot of menace into ordinary objects. The scene in which Grandmother boils mice and tries to force black threads down little Dennis’s throat is all the more horrific for the narrator’s casual reporting. This is Comyns’s art. Something sinister lurks within her prose, grabbing you when you least expect it.

I appreciated this book a lot more when I read that Comyns had been inspired by a mass poisoning event in a village in France.

My favourite remains A Touch of Mistletoe, but any time spent with Comyns’s uncanny work is time well spent.