Review: Trying To Be So Quiet (James Everington)

A small, beautiful and haunting novella about love and loss by James Everington. The narrator is surrounded by the blankness of extreme grief when an echo of the past starts to persist, making him travel back and confront his love for his dead wife. The central conceit of a fractured building works well as a metaphor for the narrator's state, and the gorgeous design of the limited hardback edition employs this well, creating tiny fissures on the top of the pages that grow larger and larger as you move through the book. Eventually the protagonist is led back through his own memories through the prompt of a face half-seen; a face that is initially vague and formless, then skeletal, and finally fleshed out. Though this is a short novella, the double metaphor of the growing cracks in the walls and the creeping solidity of his vision work as powerful conduits towards the ambiguous ending. If you like your horror quiet, stealthy, and throat-achingly sad, this is one for you.