Evoking the bleak territory of Russell Banks's fiction and the spirit of a Patricia Highsmith psychological thriller, Elizabeth Brundage's All Things Cease to Appear blends murder mystery, ghost story and domestic drama to create an engrossing and deeply unsettling novel.
Sharing a marriage that's infected by a "virus of the soul," George and Catherine Clare, with their three-year-old daughter, move to the tiny Hudson River Valley town of Chosen. They purchase the Hale farm, abandoned by the owners' three sons--who remain in town after their parents' double suicide--and are thrust into a world that's haunted by the spirit of Ella Hale, whose life and death prefigure the several tragedies that mark the story, including the murder of Catherine Clare in the novel's opening chapter.
Over the course of the lengthy flashback that composes most of the novel, the depth of George's depravity becomes clear. As she struggles to escape his stranglehold, Catherine finds herself drawing closer to the Hale brothers, even as they seem powerless to escape their fates. For all the inevitability of the tragedy at the novel's climax, Brundage demonstrates a mastery of pacing to arrive there.
Whether she's describing the starkly beautiful rural landscape or exposing the fault lines in the Clares' disintegrating marriage, Brundage's (A Stranger Like You) eye is equally observant. Her skillful use of multiple points of view heightens the tension as the day of Catherine's murder draws closer. Though it ends with a hint of redemption, All Things Cease to Appear remains a trip to the darkest territory of the human heart. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer