Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward

In a lonely cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of his childhood summer companions and the killer that stalked the small New England town. Of the body they found, and the horror of that discovery echoing down the decades. And of Sky, Wilder’s one-time best friend, who stole his unfinished memoir and turned it into a lurid bestselling novel, Looking Glass Sound.

But as Wilder writes, the lines between memory and fiction blur. He fears he’s losing his grip on reality when he finds notes hidden around the cottage written in Sky’s signature green ink.

Catriona Ward delivers another mind-bending and cleverly crafted tale about one man’s struggle to come to terms with the terrors of his past… before it’s too late.

Looking Glass Sound starts off as a coming-of-age tale. Wilder, a bullied, friendless, teen is spending the summer in an inherited cottage near the sea with his parents before they sell it. There he meets a couple of kids his own age and although they are a bit on the weird side they soon become the best and only friends he has ever had. None of these kids has a great home life and Wilder's parents have no idea how awful his school life is. The complicated relationships between all the characters was already holding my interest enough to add this book to my "couldn't put it down" list even before the creepy mystery of The Dagger Man began, who sneaks into children's bedrooms at night. I would have been perfectly happy to continue down this path to a five-star rating for this book, right up to and a little beyond the halfway point. 

Then it all changed. It became a book about everyone writing a book about everyone else's book. I may have lost count but I want to say there are four characters writing books in here. It became difficult to follow at times and I was not always sure what was supposed to be that character's point of view on what had happened or that character's fictionalized version of their book. Maybe I would have been able to follow it better if it didn't become such a chore to try to force myself to pay attention. This is my third time reading a book by this author. I had said this one would be the tie-breaker. I loved Needless Street. I did not care for Sundial and I was hoping to love this.

You may enjoy it more than I did but after such a spectacular beginning I feel disappointed with the last half.

My thanks to Tor Nightfire.

About the author