Steve-Calvert.co.uk
Steve-Calvert.co.uk
A Passion For Horror
|
___
|
When Little Peggy Buchanan disappears from view on a snowy winter's day, her older sister, Elizabeth, gets a bad feeling and goes looking for her. She takes her other sister, Laura, with her and when the two girls see Peggy's footprints leading towards the frozen swimming pool Lizzy sends Laura to get their father. By the time Laura returns, bringing their father with her, Lizzy is already standing on frozen surface of the pool and looking down at Peggy's face beneath the ice. For Peggy time stopped on five-past-three on Friday 23rd February 1940 and things would never be the same for the Buchanans again.
The girl's mother takes it the worst. Margaret Buchanan was perhaps always a little mentally frail and she can't seem to cope with her little Clothes-Peg's death and ends up being institutionalized. Grief affects their father differently causing him to loose weight and go grey before his time. Lizzy and Laura also grieve for their sister, and miss her terribly, but they cope much better than their parents do. When the apparition of a strange girl appears though, they have reason to wonder if Peggy has come back to them. The girl doesn't look like Peggy, but she feels like her somehow, even is she does seem to float along rather than walk, and brings a chill with her even on the warmest summer's day.
As the years pass, the Peggy-girl keeps appearing and a string of corpses turn up. All of them have a connection with the Buchanan family and all of them have severe frostbite. Some of them, in fact, are not just frozen to death, but frozen to pieces! The girls realise who is behind the deaths. It is how and why that they have to figure out. That and how to put a stop to it once and for all.
The Central character in Spirit is Elizabeth and so a lot of the story is told from her perspective. She is intelligent and creative; probably taking after her father, who is in the publishing industry. Laura is the vainer of the two sisters. Perhaps because she takes after her mother, who had a bit-part in a movie once and sees herself as a rising star that was grounded by her marriage and her children. Then again, perhaps she feels the need for attention because, as the middle child, she didn't feel that she got shown enough of it growing up. She wasn't as pretty as Peg, but nor was she as smart as Lizzy. Whatever the reasons Laura loves attention. She likes men to want her and women to be jealous of her and her ambitions are similar to those that her mother once had.
Spirit is an unusual story. It is also quite sad and tragedy after tragedy unfolds with the turning of the pages. It is, appropriately, a rather chilling tale too, and right up until the last pages I had no idea how it would end. The Characters are all reasonably likeable, with the natural exception of the bad guys, who are suitably loathsome, and who all come to sticky end I am glad to say.
I read the paperback version of Spirit and it ran to about 420 pages. It was an entertaining read and I enjoyed it. Even after finishing it though, I still felt a little sad for how it turned out for a lot of the characters.
|
