On 31st May, 2014 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, two twelve-year-old girls, lured a friend, Bella Leutner, into the woods and stabbed her nineteen times. Then they left her and set off for the Nicolet National Forest two hundred miles away to meet Slender Man, who they had committed this crime to appease. That's not this book. That's real life. Both were caught and tried. Geyser was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a mental hospital, as part of a forty-years-to-life sentence. Weier got twenty-five years, including psychiatric help. Leutner spent a week in hospital but recovered and went back to school.

The reason I started this review with that is because this book is quite obviously based on that real life case without referencing it. Every detail is changed here, except the underlying truth of it all. Morgan becomes Faye and Anissa becomes Anna, but they're still young girls, nine here instead of twelve. Bella, a friend, becomes Brittany, their babysitter. Slender Man, a fictional creation for a PhotoShop contest online, becomes the Kingman, whom these girls believe has been around since the dawn of time. The reasons are exactly the same. And the girls leave the crime scene to go see the Kingman in his castle on the winter island, a few hundred miles north.

While it's completely obvious to all and sundry that Lindsay Starck made these translations to this real life story for fictional purposes, she didn't dramatise it, except for the collection of ephemera that shows up in between chapters. She fast forwarded to the present day and looked at how such an unspeakable act would affect those involved. The primary character is Sylvia, Faye's mum, and most of this is told from her point of view. However, when Amelia shows up unaccompanied at Syl's door, she calls in her ex, Jack, to help, so we see some of this from his perspective as well. Amelia is Faye's daughter, their granddaughter, and Faye is missing. So Jack looks after Amelia and Syl goes looking for Faye.

Throughout all of this, somewhat inevitably, Syl thinks backwards, asking all the questions that we might expect she might ask herself and a whole bunch more, and so we gradually learn about the crime as we go, bouncing around in time to whichever memories Syl conjures up at any particular moment. That makes this far from linear, but there is a core storyline unfolding chronologically in the present-day. Of course, because this is fiction, the two end up combining and providing a host of real answers to the questions that Syl and Jack have been asking ever since it all happened.

And, of course, that's the point. This isn't a pulp horror novel about something that happens, with the act itself the centerpiece. It's a literary horror novel about guilt told by people who didn't do anything, as far as they're aware. They merely gave birth to a daughter who did something awful and they have to wonder for the rest of their lives if it was their fault. However, Syl and Jack split up because they saw this differently. Jack is convinced that they did something wrong, even if he's unable to figure out what or when. It must be their fault. Syl accepts that but looks deeper at the Kingman, generally believed to be a fictional creation, because Faye seems to believe he's real. It created a wedge between them and they divorced. Now, through Amelia, they get to try again.

Starck writes well and her prose is one reason to read this. It's really general fiction, even though it speaks of a terrible crime and it eventually solves a crucial mystery—how did the Kingman come to be and, assuming he isn't a real supernatural being who's been around since the dawn of time, who created him and why—and the subject matter feels like a tag of horror could be applied. It's really general fiction, though, certainly not horror, mystery or crime, even with so many elements of each in play. It's a character study of parents traumatised by an act orchestrated by their child.

Another element of horror that plays into this is the potential for the story to become Syl's steady descent into madness, given that she spent so much time researching the Kingman in the wake of her daughter's crime and she returns to that research now in the hope that it might help her find Faye. To me, one of the most horrific aspects ties to the right to be forgotten and how awful it has to be when you've been forgotten and your old life returns to haunt you. That manifests when the story takes Syl to Anna, who's now going by Elizabeth, and it turns out that Faye had left Amelia in her custody first. Anna was always led by Faye and, now she's escaped into becoming Elizabeth, it's Faye once more who's shaping her future. That's deep and brutal.

Of course, there's another theme here that can't be ignored, though I'll tread carefully to avoid a spoiler or twelve. The book isn't only about guilt, it's about the power of storytelling. Someone in this fictional world created a fictional character, the Kingman, and did that so successfully that an entirely unrelated couple of girls in a completely different state stab another girl almost to death to appease him. That's huge and it's why writers are often equated to gods, at which point the age-old concept of responsibility creeps in.

Every writer of fiction, whatever genre they choose to explore, fundamentally wants their words to be read and for their creations to mean something to other people. While so many of us write for ourselves, we also write for that theoretical reader out there who might find value in what we do and there's no better feeling than to hear from someone we've never met who dearly wants to let us know that we made a difference. Most of us never get any further than that, but the most successful writers get to learn about how different those differences can be. It's why Stephen King has removed 'Rage', a novel he wrote as Richard Bachman, from circulation. He doesn't want it to make the wrong sort of difference.

I liked this book, though I felt it a little light given how easily its themes could be applied to a slew of topical subjects. It feels like Starck is still writing about Slender Man, a decade old now, which is a generation in modern time. It doesn't feel like she's writing about fake news, QAnon and online radicalisation, all of which she could have played into without actually including in her story. I tend to watch 'They Live' every few years nowadays because, every time I watch it, it's about now. Sure, when John Carpenter made it in the eighties, it was his commentary on yuppies and consumerism, but it never stops being contemporary. I'm pretty sure that, if I read this three years from now and six and nine, it'll still be about Slender Man. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Lindsay Starck click here