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Steve-Calvert.co.uk
A Passion For Horror
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By
John Saul
The Unwanted is 340 pages long and the central character is a young girl called Cassie Winslow. Cassie's parents are divorced and she has been living in California with her mother. When her mother dies in a car crash the sixteen-year-old moves to the town of False Harbour to live with her father, her step-mother and her half-sister Jessica. This is not just a story about a young girl who has to come to terms with major changes in her life though. The Unwanted is a supernatural thriller and Cassie has soon has much more to deal with than the loss of her mother and settling into a new family. Cassie is troubled by a strange recurring dream. In the dream she watches her mother drive past in a car. There is nothing strange about the car, but there is something very strange about Cassie's mother. Her hair is the wrong colour. So are her eyes. In fact she doesn't look like Cassie's mother at all, and yet Cassie knows that it is. Her mother says something that Cassie can't hear, and then stars laughing just before her car veers into one of the concrete supports of an overpass and bursts into flames. A dream like this might be understandable given the circumstances, but the first time that Cassie had it was before her mother died. The dreams are unsettling enough, but in her waking hours Cassie has more real problems to deal with. She is finding it hard to settle into her new school. A lot of her classmates do not accept her. She is an outsider and made to feel just that. Her sister, Jessica, accepts her though, and the two girls are together the first time that Cassie encounters Miranda. To Cassie Miranda just appears to be an old bag-lady: a strange woman, pushing a shopping trolley, and who just happens to resemble the woman in her dream. Jessica, however, believes that Miranda is a witch and tells her sister to look away from the old woman to avoid being cursed. A lot or the children in False Harbour feel this way about Miranda, as do some adults, whereas others see her as just a madwoman. Cassie feels neither fear of nor pity for, the woman in black. She feels an instant connection to her. As the story develops Cassie is befriended by a grey cat, called Sumi, and a white hawk, called Kiska, and discovers she has some very unusual abilities that are a legacy from the past. If things are changing in Cassie's life though, they are also changing in False Harbour, and when people start getting hurt in circumstances that would baffle a logical mind, all eyes turn to the outsider, Cassie, and she retreats more and more to Miranda's cottage in the marshes and the protective wings and claws of her new friends. I enjoyed reading The Unwanted and found it easy to sympathize with Cassie's character, even if, at times, I wasn't sure whether or not a dark evil lurked inside her. It is hard not to sympathise with a young girl in such a situation, but a couple of other characters, who it was also easy to sympathize with, saw things in Cassie's eyes that worried them. As a reader, their worries were transmitted to me, and so, although I was behind Cassie all of the way, there were times when I wondered if I should be. I can't remember if I have ever felt this way towards a central character before. It's unusual, but I suppose it keeps things interesting. Every good horror novel needs to have someone in it for the reader to hate and to add a little conflict to the story. I found three people to hate within the pages of The Unwanted, but I must admit that when they finally got their just desserts, I felt a little sorry for them, which is an unusual reaction for me to have. I think that is the key word that comes to mind when thinking about The Unwanted - unusual. Because of the kind of fiction that I read I am used to unusual things happening and unusual characters too; what I am not used to is not knowing whether or not I should be behind the characters, or not, or whether I should feel sorry for them. That for me is unusual and that is what I will say about the book: it's an unusual read. List of John Saul books reviewed on this site
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