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It is 31 October on the Isle of Man. Eight-year-old Claire Cooper is out with her mother, celebrating Hop-tu Naa, the Manx version of Halloween, in a homemade witch costume, turnip lantern lighting the way. Last stop of the night is at the house of her mother’s spooky employer; Claire hates him, doesn’t want to be there, and chants the traditional Manx song “with venom” in her voice. “Hop-tu-Naa/ My mother’s gone away/ And she won’t be back until the morning.” The next morning, Claire’s mother has disappeared.
An older Claire, “the sorry glimmer of the tragic teen” clinging to her, is lonely, odd, utterly altered by that October night in her childhood. When she’s invited into a close-knit group of friends, she’s keen to fit in – to join in the game of dares they play every Hop-tu-Naa, no matter how wrong it starts to feel. One night, though, things go further than any of them had planned, and the consequences of the friends’ dark choices that evening will spool out across the years.
Chris Ewan’s Dark Tides is a hybrid of a novel, the author managing to blend elements of 90s horror films I Know What You Did Last Summer (teenagers do something bad; vengeance is wreaked) and Scream (dead mother; tragic daughter) with the conceit from, of all stories, David Nicholls’s One Day (the “one day” in Ewan’s novel being 31 October). The remote island setting – “eighty thousand people, clinging to a rock thirty-two miles long by fourteen miles wide in the middle of the Irish Sea” – gives it a touch of The Wicker Man as well. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, or at least for schlock-horror, but Ewan skilfully avoids potential mantraps of melodrama or gore to deliver a truly chilling and thoroughly enjoyable read.
Setting all the action at the end of October means his version of the Isle of Man is wreathed in fog, soaked by rain, wracked by storms. “The afternoon was unusually dark. There were no tree branches scratching the window glass, or lone dogs howling at the sky, but the October rain was hammering down in a violent frenzy and the wind coming off the Irish Sea was blasting over the sand dunes and the grassy flatlands that fronted the cottage,” he writes. And later: “The sea was raging. It was wild. High tide. A major swell. The blue-black waters roiled and undulated, surf frothing and crashing against the shore.” Entirely, deliciously, seasonally appropriate (and, despite the Bad Things that go down, a real advert for the island’s wind-swept, sea-battered shores).
Like all good horror-story protagonists, Claire, Ewan’s narrator, and her friends are kind enough to spend their time putting themselves in risky situations – blindfolding themselves in pine woods in the middle of the night, abseiling down lonely cliffs, staying in “an isolated old farmhouse” they even describe to one another as sinister. But once it’s accepted that they’re just going to carry on like this, there are genuinely bloodcurdling scares to be had here, as well as a scene of such disturbingly horrible claustrophobia it will provide flashbacks for days.
Dark Tides is published by Faber (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99
