Magic, intrigue, dreams, and death weave a tantalizing story of friendships bound by a grisly secret in Lucya Sraza's novel, Erosion.
A skull has appeared in the eroded side of a cliff face behind the witch Charlie’s house. After a lengthy debate, Alice and her friends decide to retrieve the skull before someone sees it jutting out of the cliff face like a grisly masthead. Upon claiming the skull, they discover through a seance that the former human’s name was Rosemorta. They build a shrine to her and with little to no knowledge of how necromancy works, begins paying homage to her. When Alice prays to Rosemorta, promising to do anything she asks, things start happening in her favor. Yet, like the story, The Monkey’s Paw, her requests take a dark turn. During an impromptu ritual on an isolated beach Alice's former boss dies in a house fire. Did Alice kill Ms. Sweet by throwing her effigy into a bonfire, or was that a coincidence? The friends consult Rosemorta’s skull to find out. Yet, suspicion and lack of trust cast Alice out of the house before the seance begins.
There is something almost Hitchcockian about how the author tells this story, which is something I greatly appreciate. There is the same tension the reader feels when watching The Birds, or Marnie; the sense that everything is slightly off kilter. Starza deftly uses the so-called eerie valley sensation that makes everything seem familiar, yet not quite. It makes the book unsettling, and yet at the same time intriguing and familiar. The characters are fully developed. They feel like people whom we know, and yet there is that same quirkiness found in characters who populate Hitchcock films. There is Charlie the witch who lives in her grandmother’s cottage that’s on the verge of falling into the sea, who grows weed and makes furniture from driftwood.
And then, there’s Mrs. Sweet, the uncouth pub owner who dies in a house fire. We will never know the truth of her demise. Was it Rosemorta who killed Mrs. Sweet upon Alice’s insistence, or was it an accident? The thunderstorm that destroyed Charlie’s house the night of their last seance prevented them from learning the truth.
This is a fantastic read. I loved the characters, the little town by the seaside and the wonderful Hitchcocky way she tells Alice's story. I especially loved her references to literary fiction that makes Alice, the English Lit graduate feel so familiar to me. I'm excited about this book and I look forward to reading more of her fiction.
~review by Patricia Snodgrass
Author: Lucya Starza
Moon Books, 2024
p. $12.95, pp.175
