Written by Tom Carrao
Even under the best of circumstances, moving houses can exact quite a toll—physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Compound that with a recent stay at a psychiatric facility and the lingering wounds of spousal betrayal, and the stakes are raised considerably. In the opening pages of Felicity Everett’s new suspense novel, the reader is introduced to fragile protagonist Karen, reeling with boundless, imperceptible scars and bruises, beholden to a treacherous insecurity that gives rise to envisioning conspiracy all around her, which kicks up doubt and distrust of everyone’s motivation. Her contrite husband Nick has created a perfect environment in which Karen may heal and convalesce far from the strains and pressures of their urban lives, purchasing a seemingly idyllic country cottage, going so far as to build a new studio for his wife to resume her ceramics work, a craft for which she had been on the cusp of great success before her life derailed.
This new location, of course, is unable to quiet or extinguish in any definitive way the demons of painful memory. An initial visit from her best friend Jude and husband Dave only exacerbates the anxieties and uncertainties that Karen suffers over this new start.
Karen, uneasy and uncomfortable, is prey to queasy perceived threats from the surroundings—distant, still figures lurk on hills, staring; dark, darting shapes steal about the property and nearby lanes; feral delinquents enact aggressive vehicular manoeuvres on the roads and interrupt community events with a vaguely menacing presence. Whereas all other members of the small town shrug at the behaviour, it is Karen who regards each incident as another example of a cankerous rot in Paradise. Who is tampering with the family car? Did a distracted Karen really leave the kiln on so that her most recent casts are left in ruins? How could a bird have become trapped in the studio to eventually expire and spread pestilent odours?
Never truly settling, Karen’s encounters with the locals are fraught with awkwardness and misgivings, while in contrast her husband’s casual ease and ingratiation is a source of great abiding agitation. She eventually grows closest to hearty Scot Cath, a landscape gardener grieving the recent death of her wife. There are disagreements with the rest: insufferably assured Douglas and pert wife Imogen (a source of jealousy as Karen suspects a growing affection between her and husband Nick) and their two cordially hostile offspring Honour and Grace; resident B&B owners Ray and Min who restore vintage motorbikes in their spare time; gruff Gordon and mousy Jean in whose relationship the spectre of abuse is conjectured; and cosmopolitan Luca and Melissa, gallery owners, who offer Karen an opportunity to create new work for exhibition, Luca’s true motivations in helping her unclear.
If anything, Everett pushes Karen’s hysteria to such a degree that she risks losing a reader’s sympathy—at a certain point in the story, it is all too reasonable to shift opinion in favour of the reactions of supporting players, even though focus and voice is relentlessly exclusive to Karen. In service to this, many potentially interesting plot points are abruptly dropped or left wanting development. And yet this may only be an understanding that Karen has been simply exaggerating what is in actuality benign, an unreliable guide through the thicket—there is no feasible way for them to progress. This is hardly the cabal of satanists in Rosemary’s Baby manipulating the title character into belief of her own madness, Karen, in many ways, seems the architect of her own downfall.
The origin of her relationship with Nick founded itself in an adulterous gesture, so deep in her bones Karen has always imagined that something would eventually go wrong with the marriage that followed, borne on the ashes of a previous one. Feelings of class inadequacy plague her. Nick’s first wife, who was poised, elegant, and a member of high society, only exposes her own fraudulence. Despite many years of marriage, the nagging agony that she and Nick have stubbornly performed happy coupledom simply out of fear of embarrassment or inconvenience settles on her. And Nick’s affability may indeed hide a nasty core of control. The sex, as portrayed, is pitched somewhere between abject desperation and sadomasochism, flecked with troubling shards of anger and active punishment. Subversive elements of her previous work hint at a predilection (preference?) for the dark side, a rejection of the traditional; her heart soars out to a group of ravers in the forest that her fellow adults find faintly distasteful (“there was an energy in their hedonism that I found beguiling…a sybaritic two-fingered salute to everything about the English countryside that was staid and safe and depressing”).
Perhaps all of the bumps experienced in this foreign territory, unhinged as they may seem, are a means to guide Karen towards a necessary revelation and a true path that remove her far afield of anyone else’s intentions for her. The ultimate voice to which she must submit—and trust—is her own. In the end, it is time for Karen to declare and embrace her own wild. The most essential move, or shift, ultimately, must be internal.
The Move is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
From the author of The People at Number 9, a new story of nightmare neighbours…
‘Felicity has the reader gripped when she explores unhealthy relationships based on insecurity and delusion. She writes with a raw realism.’ Adele Parks, Platinum
Can you paint over the cracks in a marriage?
Karen has packed up her life and is making The Move. She’s on her way to the idyllic country cottage which her husband has painstakingly renovated for her. They’re escaping the London bustle and the daily grind. And they’re escaping their past.
A fresh start in a beautiful, peaceful village. It will be different here, right?
But something is awry. The landscape, breathtaking by day, is eerie by night. The longed-for peace and solitude is stifling. And the house, so artfully put together by her husband, has a strange vibe. Now that Karen is cut off from her old friends and family, she can’t help wondering if her husband has plans of his own, and that history might be repeating itself.
From the author of the bestselling The People at Number 9 comes a dark and redemptive tale of a rural dream gone wrong…
