The Island of Faith and Lies

Catriona Ward, Little Eve

On a tiny Scottish island forgotten in the backwash of World War I, a strange prophecy has come to fruition. Five people and a horse lie dead, and a 5000-year-old megalith has fallen over. This was the final act needed to purge the world and bring The Adder into the world, purging corrupt humanity. So what exactly happened here? How did one teenage girl cause so much death and destruction? And where, exactly, is The Adder?

This, Catriona Ward’s second novel, debuted in Britain in 2018, but didn’t receive an American release for years. Only after some of Ward’s latter novels, particularly The Last House on Needless Street, garnered American acclaim did anyone think readers across the pond would appreciate this novel. Having read it, I understand why publishers would’ve assumed a limited Yankee Doodle audience: it’s almost aggressively British. Yet I think that only increases this book’s American appeal.

The laird of Altnaharra, one John Bearings—identified throughout almost exclusively as “Uncle”—believes himself a messiah. He receives visions from his snake, Hercules. He has formed a doomsday redoubt inside his ancestral castle, comprised of two common-law wives and four foundling children. He forces everyone else to live austere vegetarian lives (while he indulges in beef and gravy), and performs periodic tests to determine which of his children will become the harbinger of his snake cult.

If this sounds like a frenetic mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Wicker Man, I won’t disagree. Ward channels a specific kind of apocalyptic fear, not of the world ending, but of unhinged people awaiting that end. The castle teems with caverns, hidden rooms, and labyrinthine hallways, the lifeblood of gothic horror. As in the best gothics, supernatural occurrences have become seemingly common, but we must wonder how supernatural they really are.

Trapped inside the Altnaharra castle, Uncle enforces capricious discipline, while his children adapt themselves to appease his moods. The war-ravaged outside world is too busy to interfere, so Uncle’s religion becomes ingrown, consuming the children. Teenaged Evelyn particularly struggles with Uncle. She wants his approval, and campaigns to be named his successor; but she also can’t help seeing how manifestly corrupt Uncle has become. Her attempts to escape only make her situation worse.

Catriona Ward

Ward starts her narrative at its conclusion, as the rural villagers living in Altnaharra’s shadow discover the bloodbath. What actually happened unfolds only in flashback, as the massacre’s only survivor dribbles out information sparingly. While the villagers seek pat answers and want to close the coroner’s inquest quickly, the few facts we receive only make things muddier. This is only made worse when it becomes clear that Evelyn has buried key facts, and Dinah, the only survivor, is lying.

It probably comes as no surprise to readers of horror literature that, the more thoroughly we believe something on Page One, the more surely we’ll see that belief shattered. Ward’s other novels have shown her ability to cantilever multiple twists. We attempt to predict what surprises Ward will throw our way, because horror literature since the late 1990s has trained us to watch for rug-pulls in Act III. Ward knows this, and her twists are truly surprising to today’s jaded audiences.

What, Ward asks us, makes a family? Uncle chose his two wives and four children because he needs adulation. He maintains their loyalty, not through love and devotion, but through caprice and Crowleyist woo-woo. Uncle’s wives have differing reactions to his ministrations, and their responses reflect traditions of Jungian psychology. But Uncle’s children choose not to escape, even when opportunities arise, because Uncle’s violent whimsy is all they know. They have no survival skills without him.

This novel also uses themes of religion as a shared activity. Uncle leads his apocalyptic cult unilaterally; he alone receives revelations from The Adder, and dispenses justice that might be god-given, or might be arbitrary. Religion holds Uncle’s ramshackle family together, but it also creates divisions, as cult members try to determine who’s blessed or damned. Capital-T Truth comes from Uncle alone, and his motivations are hardly beyond question.

Ward cultivates fear, not through monsters and blood—despite kicking off the story with a crime scene, Ward uses violence so sparingly that, when it does happen, it’s even more shocking—but through misdirection and claustrophobia. Our narrators lie because lying is the only language they know. The outside world of objective truth and information only confuses them. We see the world through their eyes, and what we see is truly terrifying.