Disturbing debut
‘ For fans of reading group fiction.” Does that publisher’s blurb depress you? And the narrator’s mother is a serial killer who preys on small children: does that detail disconcert you? It eventually disconcerts teenage Annie, who hands Muminto the police, gets a new identity, new home ( big, with white pillars at the front) new family ( small, though also white) and hopes of a new life.
Alas, things are never that easy in genre fiction. After all, we’ve got 300- plus pages to fill, and Ali Land’s debut shocker fills them with an abundance of emotional and psychological detail.
Annie, now named Milly, is racked by guilt: “If I’d gone to the police earlier . . . the last boy you took could still be alive.” She shudders through her nights, trying to ignore the slither that comes hissing under the door, calling itself Mummy.
Her new foster- sister, Phoebe, dislikes her intensely. Pretty, catty Phoebe is so realistic you’ll want to send her to her room. Later, you’ll be shaken by what happens to her. She’s as promising a character as Annie/ Milly, but only partially developed, though Land uses her to show the tribal vindictiveness of high school girls with unsettling accuracy.
The trials Milly faces at her school are more severe in some ways than those she faces in the courtroom, with its smooth defence lawyers and harrowing tabloid revelations of peep- hole and pillow.
Cellphones become threats; a school dramatisation of Lord of the Rings carries all sorts of perils.
Then her mother is convicted and confined. Milly finds stratagems and concealments. A precocious, imperilled 12- year- old from the nearby housing estate enters the plot, and a precarious friendship builds.
It doesn’t last. Milly aches to be “good”; to conform and “do life after mother”, and at the best bits, you’ll ache with her. But she can revert to self- preserving feral inside a paragraph, with juddering consequences.
Good Me, Bad Me has plenty of drama and melodrama. There’s a surfeit of psychological tics and Gothic drumbeats. Land’s young protagonist will certainly haunt you. You’ll want to rush and hug your own kids.