The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

 

Summary (from the publisher): The Vet’s Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife’s death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.

Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O’Connor and Stephen King, The Vet’s Daughter is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.

Review: Alice lives with her ailing mother and brutish father in a dark London suburb. After her mother's death, her father moves in a brash and domineering woman and tries to turn Alice to her own occupation. With only a deaf-mute friend in the neighborhood and her father's various animal patients as companions, Alice is increasingly miserable until she is sent away to a position caring for an ailing, depressive in a half burnt out house in the countryside. Alice retreats deeper and deeper into a dreamlike state while the world around her grows seemingly ever bleaker. 

There is a grim realism to this book that is both disarming and haunting: charming puppies sold off to be killed, cats accidentally half-baked alive, the dying breaths of Alice's mother in her little room. There is also a raw physicality to the descriptions from the loud, scuffing sounds of boots on iron staircases to the stiff, black hairs on the fingers of the vet's fingers. 

Alice's story is unsettling and discomfiting. This reminded me of Shirley Jackson's novels both in unnerving nature of the tale and the odd nature of its characters. In the end, Alice ascended straight out of her misery and the collection of murky, suspicious characters that made up her orbit. Extremely well-written albeit very bleak, this was a quick read. 

Stars: 4