Dibs

British novelist Matt Haig has a knack for capturing death: not as, say, a writer of mysteries or thrillers or horror fiction would, but in a bitingly, achingly realistic way, in non-genre novels whose darkness takes on a million subtle colors and textures. Haig’s debut novel, The Dead Fathers Club – published in 2007 -- enters the mind of a preteen boy whose father has died recently in a car crash and whose mother is moving on. Complete with a ghost and a yen for vengeance, it echoes Hamlet and made me laugh and cry until I was nearly crazy with admiration and delight. Now in Haig’s new book, The Possession of Mr. Cave, we meet a quiet widower who becomes increasingly obsessed with his fifteen-year-old daughter after the accidental death of her twin brother — his son. Drowning in grief and guilt, for he never really tried to understand the now-lost Reuben, antique dealer Terence Cave interrogates and stalks the beautiful and bereft Bryony, who edges farther and farther away from him as he becomes the dad from hell. His paranoia won’t relent, and tragedy begets tragedy. The bittersweet thing about this, and the thing Haig always captures so well, is that Terence is fully aware of what he is doing and what is happening, but unable to stop. “Out of our mistakes, out of our pain, arrives everything we love in this world,” Terence muses. “All that humans create serves solely to lessen the terror of existence. The terror that Beethoven and Keats and Van Gogh and every supreme artist has ever felt, the collective terror of a humanity that still shambles around, looking at dark and untrustworthy shadows rather than true reflections.” Fear haunts us and provokes us and prompts us, Terence points out as fear tears him quietly apart. Anyone who has ever suffered a loss, or even thought about it, will find in Matt Haig a sage, a companion and a friend.