A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
The Night Sister
Jennifer McMahon
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.
Lois McMaster Bujold
The Curse of Chalion
I should’ve DNF’d when I had the chance. I hated this book so much that I canceled my library hold on The Winter People, and I have no plans to pursue any more of McMahon’s books. But since I did read this one in its entirety and since they haven’t yet invented the Neuralyzer, we might as well talk about it while it’s still squatting in my head.
This extremely avoidable shitshow first draws back its curtains in the small town of London, Vermont as Amy Sylvia Bellavance (née Amy Sylvia Slater, because McMahon really didn’t think that through), age 36 and about to enact the final entry in a database of terrible decisions, fetches her grandfather’s Winchester and makes her way up the stairs of her house to her sleeping husband and son. She tries to justify her plans by telling herself that she simply had no choice and could not have avoided this catastrophe with the hand she was dealt, though time and the rest of the book will prove her wrong. As a shadow emerges from the detached tower of her family’s long-defunct roadside motel, she leaves a hasty message for her ex-BFFs, a pair of sisters named Piper and Margot, and proceeds to the second floor. Thirty minutes later, police officer Jason Hawke arrives on the scene and is stunned to find Amy and her family dead in the middle of a bloodbath. The sole survivor is her ten-year-old daughter, Louisa (“Lou”), bloodstained and hiding on the roof. With no other explanation, the police officially conclude that Amy went crazy and gunned down her husband and son before killing herself. The news comes as a blow to Margot, married to Jason and in the final stages of a risky pregnancy, and, though he tries to shield her from it, the matter is not helped when Piper comes to visit and gets sucked into Margot’s obsession with proving Amy’s innocence.
Two decades earlier, twelve-year-old Amy sets out to find out what happened to her Aunt Sylvie, who disappeared in 1961 at the age of eighteen. Piper and Margot follow her everywhere like puppies and help her in her quest, while Jason – also twelve and a real dweeb – hangs around the outskirts of their group, spying on everything they do as he desperately tries to get Amy’s attention. This whole preteen drama takes place on the premises of the Tower Motel, which closed its doors in 1971 when the new highway drove it out of business. The motel was built by Amy’s grandfather, Clarence Slater, who met her grandmother Charlotte in an English hospital during the Second World War and later brought her home to Vermont, where he built a small-scale replica of the Tower of London. In the shadow of the tower they raised their two daughters – Sylvia (“Sylvie”), angelically blonde and greatly doted upon, and therefore possessed of a staggering narcissism that convinced her that Alfred Hitchcock would be completely interested in the troubles of an eleven-year-old girl; Rose, physically unappealing and behaviorally questionable – and life would’ve been fine if it weren’t for the increasingly nasty rivalry between Sylvie and Rose. Having received a hefty dose of German folklore from their maternal grandmother at a young age, both girls grew up convinced that the other was a creature called a “mare,” a malevolent shapeshifter, an impression made worse by a series of creepy happenings that seemed to center around the tower. Matters finally came to a head shortly after Sylvie’s eighteenth birthday, when Rose caught her trying to run away from home and attempted to capture her, but accidentally knocked her off the top of the tower.
All of this is unknown to 1989 Amy, who spearheads a very dangerous investigation (from a practical standpoint, not a supernatural one) that seems to be dogged by the ghost of Sylvie. After finding a letter written by Sylvie and addressed to Hitchcock (and then stolen by Rose from the mailbox – I told you their relationship was nasty), in which Sylvie speaks of a twenty-ninth room in the 28-room motel, Amy becomes obsessed with this secret room and goes to great lengths to find it. The search eventually bears fruit when the girls uncover a literal dungeon under the tower, but they also find a skeleton with just enough blonde hair remaining to vaguely resemble Sylvie. When confronted with this information, Charlotte – sole guardian and caretaker of Amy, as her father is unknown and Rose has a reputation as an alcoholic – admits that the skeleton in fact belongs to Fenton, a distant cousin on Clarence’s side. Unable or unwilling to believe in Charlotte’s attempt to explain the family curse, Amy denounces her and severs all ties with Piper and Margot, ordering them never to speak of what they have seen or heard. As all three girls grow up, Amy goes on to casually date (read: sleep with) Jason before pushing him towards Margot, who has nursed a crush on him since childhood, while Piper eventually moves to California. Though they keep in awkward and impersonal contact via Facebook as adults, they never see each other again, and by the time they are old enough for regret it is far too late.
In the present day, Lou has been sent to live in a squalid trailer with her Aunt Crystal, apparently her only living relation aside from Rose, who was put into Foxcroft Health and Rehab when she tried to talk about the family curse and got branded with the crazy iron by the ever-vigilant Amy. Prodded by Margot to carry out a private investigation behind the backs of the police, Piper meets with Lou and realizes that her perspective of the slaughter doesn’t line up with Jason’s eyewitness account of the aftermath. Crystal – a negligent guardian at best – notes Piper’s utility as a babysitter and errand-runner and demands her services. After a quick visit to Lou’s abandoned house to pick up some clothes and toys, Piper notices movement in the tower and goes to investigate for no other reason than the opinions of Amy, who I feel bound to point out is quite dead. Reentering the dungeon, she finds it empty but with a suspiciously lived-in look to it. Thoroughly rattled, she visits Lou a second time and finds her alone in the trailer, and, unable to locate Crystal, takes Lou to Margot and Jason’s house.
With Lou apparently safe and well cared for, Piper visits Rose in Foxcroft and finds her both articulate and completely aware of her surroundings, though she is regularly drugged as a precaution. In the little time that she has before her next round of meds, Rose tells Piper that Charlotte’s side of the family typically produces mares every other generation. Charlotte requested the creation of the dungeon out of an abundance of caution, intending to lock up one or both of her daughters if either of them began to exhibit dangerous traits, but her own mother was horrified at the inhumanity of this plan, and told her that neither girl was a mare. Both women’s decisions backfired spectacularly when Rose killed Fenton, then backfired again when Rose – with no memory of her time as a mare – confronted Sylvie at the top of the tower, believing her to be the mare, and accidentally killed her. Both murders were efficiently covered up by Charlotte, who wanted to avoid any negative publicity. In the time since her sister’s death, Rose has learned to control her shapeshifting to a certain degree, to the point that Foxcroft is completely useless; however, her attempts to warn Amy fell on deaf ears, and she has therefore been unable to help Lou. Realizing that Lou is a particularly dangerous mare and that she has left her alone with Margot, Piper rushes to intervene before it is too late. Meanwhile, Jason and the rest of the police find two more mauled bodies, these ones belonging to Crystal and Lou’s “friend” Kendra, best known for pulling the wings off of butterflies. While investigating Crystal’s trailer, Jason learns that Piper took Lou to his house.
Back at the house, Margot goes into labor but is unable to contact anyone, as all of the phones are down. She also begins to realize that there is something seriously wrong with Lou, based on the fact that the child appears to have claws. Piper therefore finds her out back of the house, trying to escape, while Lou, panther-shaped and ambiguously intentioned, watches from nearby. She is briefly soothed by the appearance of Rose, who escapes Foxcroft and joins them in the form of a large, shaggy dog, but she grows angry again when Piper tries to offer her a normal life. It is in this way that Piper learns that Amy chained her own daughter in the dungeon, to the point that Lou still has bruises from the cuffs that she used, and that Lou has no interest in any “normal” solution these stupid adults can cook up. The killing of her family was unintentionally triggered by her terror and her loneliness during her involuntary confinement as she lay strapped to a bed crying for the mother who locked her up MY GOD THIS FAMILY IS HORRIBLE.
Things look bad for a hot second when Jason shows up waving a gun, but he is distracted when Margot has a seizure. Rose and Lou use the chaos to disappear as Jason and Piper rush Margot to the hospital, where she goes straight into surgery and finally is delivered of a healthy little girl, whom they name Ella. Ella’s birth heals the decades-long rift between Piper and Jason, who have never quite seen eye to eye, and their newfound peace is helped substantially when Piper finally tells him the goddamn truth. Later he receives a call at the hospital and goes to the motel to find everything completely ablaze, and finally, silently, lets go of his almost lifelong obsession with Amy. Through the flames of the tower he sees the dog and the panther and follows them, almost shooting the panther before he sees the blue of its eyes and recognizes it as Lou.
These people are very stupid. The mare curse is a blip compared to the actual curse, which is the absolutely unjustifiable ignorance and stupidity of every single member of this family aside from Lou, who might still have a couple of brain cells. It’s not too late for her to escape the family curse of Terrible ParentsTM. I find it particularly offensive that they don’t learn. Every generation repeats the mistakes of the last in a way that feels like willful idiocy. The most sensible parent in this dumpster fire was Oma, maternal grandmother to Sylvie and Rose, who was a mare herself and actually did try to prepare Rose until her own idiot daughter (Charlotte) accused her of corrupting the minds of the children and threw her out. Now, granted, this is according to Rose, who is not even slightly reliable, but it tracks with Charlotte’s apparent decision to take the Dursley route in the hopes of stamping any trace of the supernatural out of her children. Oma’s early ejection made Rose a far more annoying character than she had to be as she spent all her time sneaking around, stealing Sylvie’s letters, and trying to “catch” Sylvie in the act of transforming. At the same time, this is unfair to Rose, who also was so thoroughly gaslit by Charlotte that she felt like she had to present a transformed Sylvie as proof of her accusations. Even if Sylvie was the uncontested favorite, Charlotte should have known her own daughter well enough to know that Rose would not accept “You’re lying, shut up” as the end of the matter. She might as well have pushed Sylvie from the tower herself; in a way she almost did. She heard her daughters fighting and did nothing to intervene, and for some reason thought it was best to tell Rose about the family curse only after Sylvie was dead. Ignorance is not protection, Charlotte.
In the next iteration of this dreadful family, Amy is raised completely without knowledge of mares and reacts with fury when told about them at the age of twelve. She spends the rest of her life shutting down any mention of monsters or curses and later puts Rose into Foxcroft, just as Charlotte sent Oma back to England. She doesn’t begin to accept Rose’s warnings until she actually sees Lou transform with her own eyes, and then she responds by branding Lou as dangerous – which, to be fair, she has the potential to be – and chaining her in the dungeon. Her own child. Her (I believe) very beloved daughter. Chained in a dungeon alone. I have no doubt of the purity of Amy’s intentions, I’m just saying she went about it in a manner that all but guaranteed violence. One often meets their destiny on the road they take to avoid it, and that seems to have been the case here. The thing is, it doesn’t seem like Lou was actually dangerous until Amy chained her in a dungeon and left her alone, or at least it doesn’t seem like she’d killed anyone. As far as I know, there was no trail of bodies before the advent of the dungeon; the slaughter at the beginning of the book seems to have been her first killing.
And yet even at the end of the line, when everything has gone so wrong and it should be fairly obvious that mistakes have been made, Amy still believes with her whole chest that she could not or would not do anything differently. She disdains the more privileged people who will hear about her case, who she feels sure will judge her because she is pOoR, and assures herself that they will never have to make the choices she has made. No, bitch, we’re judging you for trying to shoot your fucking daughter. She even congratulates herself for not telling her husband a goddamn thing about the curse as she is literally creeping up the stairs of her house clutching a rifle. Bestie, what??? What is the plan here – to shoot your daughter and then pat yourself on the back for not telling your husband why you shot her? All of which raises another question: what actually did happen on that night? If the police concluded that Amy shot her family, then they must, in fact, have been shot; but also Piper later says that Lou is the one who killed them, though granted Piper was not there and is mostly spitballing. Did Mark and Levi accidentally get caught in the crossfire when Amy tried to shoot Lou? Did she shoot them preemptively, or during the attack, in order to put them out of their misery? Or was it just that they were so clawed up that any lack of bullet wounds went unnoticed?
As for the characters who were not born into this brainless clan, Jason is annoying as a child, particularly as he feels entitled to set up camp in one of the abandoned motel rooms, routinely spies on Amy, and keeps trying to push his way into her life when he clearly is not wanted. It was nice at the end to learn that he does genuinely love Margot on her own merits and not merely as a replacement for Amy, and I was glad that he finally managed to let go of his Amy obsession, which even he realized was pathetic. Piper is supposed to be taking care of Margot, which she does do, but she also ends up driving a wedge between Margot and Jason at the worst possible time, so she won’t be winning Sister of the Year anytime soon. By rights she should’ve died during her ill-conceived solo visit to the tower, undertaken solely because the ghost of Amy – not her real ghost, the constructed memory camped out in Piper’s head – triple-dog-dared her and called her a chickenshit. She should not still be falling for that toxic little girl shit in her thirties, especially since Amy almost made her die of blood poisoning when they were twelve. Can we see some learning here? Any learning at all??? That was also the scene that turned me against Margot, who sensed danger but somehow didn’t think that maybe it wasn’t a great time to be blowing up Piper’s phone every couple of minutes. If the intention was for Margot to be annoying as fuck, McMahon could not have done a better job. There’s fault on both sides here, because after the first call Piper should’ve put that phone on silent. This literally is not rocket science. If you’re in a creepy fucking house next door to a creepy fucking tower and you can hear some creepy fucking person slinking around in the places you are not, turning off the phone should be the first step in not getting fucking killed. Rose could’ve hopped out of nowhere and mauled her and I would’ve had zero objections.
Leaving aside the terrible characters, the rest of the book is a bore. Despite the blood-soaked intro, it somehow manages to move at a snail’s pace as it bounces between 2013, 1989, 1961, and 1955. Jason’s moony stalker activities are so boring and did not need as many chapters as they received. Amy is dead but still fucks everyone over from the grave, Sylvie and Rose have absolutely nothing going for them, Piper and Margot are tied for Most Annoying Non-Slater of the Century, and I just feel bad for Lou. The whole cast is so awful that they made me forget the crucial fact that Fenton groomed Sylvie and tried to run away with her to Hollywood, and that’s really bad. And after all that drama and all the spooky vibes, the resolution fell flat because it wasn’t what I expected. The synopsis speaks of the girls uncovering something “dark and twisted,” from which I concluded that they would stumble across a monster of the more primordial variety and it would have to be vanquished. It was disappointing when the “monster” turned out to be Rose, who spent most of her adulthood sneaking around the outskirts of Amy’s life, leaving creepy messages and making people think the motel was inhabited by a demon of some kind. I was expecting an unholy entity but got something far more prosaic and well-meaning, which is kind of a pity. I would’ve liked it better if they really had awoken some gothic horror in the bowels of the tower. At the same time, Lou’s reveal as a mare wasn’t really a twist because I had her pegged as the prime suspect, and possibly an unnatural one, the moment her story diverged from Jason’s.
In the end, I gave the book two stars instead of one because it did keep me reading and I did like the setting and the concept of mares, even if McMahon’s mares are a bit different from the original folklore, and I guess that’s something. Even if I was thinking of DNF’ing in the beginning, it made a strong enough case for itself that I ultimately decided to see it through. The pacing sucks but it’s a fairly quick read, which doesn’t come even close to making sense. But the characters are infuriating, as is their refusal to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, and their unapologetic worship of the “Ignorance is safety!” approach killed any sympathy I might have had. Guarding the knowledge of the curse helped no one and harmed everyone, and if it really does go back untold generations then these idiots should have it down to a science by now. I genuinely do not know how they have survived for so long, though I suppose it is possible that any mare-controlling traditions might have been lost when Charlotte kicked Oma out of the house and condemned her daughters to a lifetime of confusion, gaslighting, and ignorance. I will give Rose some grace for at least trying to warn Amy, but there is absolutely no excuse for Charlotte, who quite literally let her eldest daughter die and refused to learn anything from it. Even if it was too late for Sylvie and Rose, the curse is something that should’ve been normalized when Amy was still young enough to receive it with an open mind. A little bit of knowledge could have gone a long way to saving at least a couple of lives.
But of course, if these characters had any sense then there wouldn’t be a story and there wouldn’t be a marketable book, and that is a sin that I can never forgive. There are so many things in this book that feel like they were merely convenient, from the stupidity of the characters to the splitting headache that only seems to affect Rose at the most dramatic moment possible to the inexplicable loss of phone service at Jason and Margot’s house, again at the most dramatic moment possible. Unless mares have some technology-blocking magic I don’t know about, and which is never mentioned, I doubt if Lou has the knowledge or the ability to sabotage the phones. I never felt any connection to these people or their problems, and McMahon’s decision to end the book with one of Sylvie’s final letters to Hitchcock (undelivered, like all the rest) didn’t strike the poignant note that clearly was intended. It’s hard to see a point to this or indeed to any of her letters when they are so unabashedly self-absorbed, they never actually get mailed, and Sylvie does not, in fact, live forever, the way she wishes she could. We can’t even say she lives on in the hearts and minds of her descendants because she doesn’t have any and the only person who really cared about finding her was Amy, who is dead. If she is supposed to be immortalized in her own unmailed letters, this isn’t obvious. I can’t see that working unless her letters are for some reason put on display in a museum, which they won’t be.
In full transparency, I will acknowledge that this book has a decent average rating from readers who are not me, or at any rate it’s higher than the rating I gave it. I am not a horror fan, more or less for the reasons enumerated above, and it’s more than likely that I’m just not the right reader for this particular book. Even so, this is the worst book I read in the month of January, and I’m wondering if it won’t also be the worst book I read all year. Time will tell with that last one, but in the meantime I have so many regrets and I have no one to blame but myself.
