Once upon a time, a 39-year-old unemployed actor, embroiled in a divorce from his cheating wife, drifting further from his two kids and falling deeper into depression, began unraveling the mystery of his mother, Laura, who committed suicide when he was only six. Thus Craig (A Vicious Circle) begins this dreamy, spellbinding novel, her first to be published in the U.S. Downtrodden Benedick Hunter yearns to find out why his mother, a successful writer and illustrator of children's fairy tales, killed herself. He becomes obsessed with her dark fables (think Sendak or Gorey), which always take place in the depths of the woods, "the deepest, darkest manifestations of the subconscious you could hope to find." Benedick delves into his own subconscious as he struggles to understand why he can hardly keep himself together. His longing to interview Laura's former friends and colleagues takes him from London to America, where he receives only conflicting accounts of the mad genius. To learn the truth, no matter how frightening, Benedick must find his long-lost relatives (who also live at the edge of a dark wood). With a sure hand, Craig brings chilling suspense and dark humor to a stylized study of the loss of childhood innocence, the complexities of creativity and the correlation between artistic genius and mental health—all expertly cloaked in the symbols and metaphors of fairy tales. Agent, Emma Parry of Carlisle and Co. (Jan. 15)
Forecast:Considering this country's ongoing fascination with mental illness, Craig should find as many readers here as in her native England.
A Vicious Circle is being developed as a film by the director of
Bridget Jones's Diary, and a blurb from National Book Award–winner Andrew Solomon should spark further interest.
