BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Disappearing’ By Lori Roy

OPINION:

THE DISAPPEARING: A NOVEL

By Lori Roy

Dutton, $27, 352 pages

The chilling darkness of a burial grave is the soul of this memorable mystery.

Lori Roy, an Edgar Award-winning author from the Midwest, is a remarkable writer especially when she is tracking with a strange elegance a family steeped in death. What makes her prose lyrically different from most mysteries is her capacity to build her plot from shreds of horror. There is a haunted child called Talley and a deeply bitter woman called Lore Fielding who preoccupy the book, which is oddly interspersed with crisp concepts of a scene in a bar.

And of course there is the hovering Annalee where all shadows seem to gather, because within the darkness of the old Fielding house is the undying memory of the “boys who run” and the terrible recollection of why they ran. Nobody in the town of Waddell, Florida, likes to talk about that and therein lies the darkness that cannot be explained, especially by those who knew it best.

The cast of characters so vividly drawn by Ms. Roy is close to gruesome, especially the chilling Daryl who has waited so long for revenge in his pursuit of his dead brother. The author writes about a shattered family and a past that includes the Little Sisters of the South, and you can read anything you want into that. But keep in mind Susannah and her impending demise and the red kerchief she ties over her golden curls.

Ms. Roy writes with ghostly fingers over a haunted world which is all the more frightening because on the surface it is so domestic and casual, with cupboards full of porcelain china that is cherished as the past is always cherished by the Fieldings. The author is no sentimentalist, but her blows are struck with a feathery touch not a sledgehammer. Which is what makes the book so appalling. And always so appealing.

It is the same kind of fear that infuses the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and that should be taken as a compliment to the darkness in which Ms. Roy chooses to work.

This is a book where imagination must be suspended because much of it does not make literary sense. Ms. Roy is walking in her own footsteps in many chapters, and guessing where she is going and with whom does not always work.

The book doesn’t so much end as it crumbles, and there is no such thing as a happy ending here. If you really want to cheat, look up Annalee’s fate and you may feel she deserves worse. Yet the Fielding family is a strange and unlikely concoction of human beings. The ideal of a young girl hiding in a closet while her father combs the neighborhood for the boy believed to have attacked her is overwrought because Lane emerges as a sad and submerged person and remains in that posture throughout the book.

It is as though you are reading an ancient scripture of the Deep South, and certainly the images of young blacks fleeing in terror from segregationists haunts the pages. But the running boys are only one of the horrors at the center of “The Disappearing” because whatever terrifies them touches everyone. Since family events never take real shape here, or at least not in the usual ways, most the townspeople are less frightening than eerily unbelievable.

Ms. Roy also has a habit of repeating her warnings about the kind of people who dominate her book, these being more flimsy than fully fleshed-out. The reader will go on reading — but wondering why and if and when it will all end will not necessarily bring answers to this first-class mystery/thriller. Ms. Roy’s writing in other hands might drown in what seems to be fakery and drama, but she — and this fine book — is better than that.

• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.