Twisted River is a chilling tale of domestic noir that recounts what happens when a seemingly ideal house-swap goes horrendously wrong. Two families come to an arrangement about swapping homes on either side of the Atlantic: one, a quirky house at Curragower Falls in Limerick, and the other, a smart Manhattan apartment at Riverside Drive, New York. They have never met, just on the internet.
On the face of it the O’Brien and the Harvey families are similar. Two professional couples, each with two kids roughly the same age. Both families badly need a holiday as they are going through troubled times. However, as the holiday unfolds they very soon realise that rather than soothe their ills they have unwittingly stepped into the dark spaces the other has left behind.
Domestic noir is an increasingly popular genre. Given recent successes such as Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on The Train and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, readers of detective fiction, whodunnits and crime fiction certainly seem to like it. It appears that domestic situations are a fertile breeding ground for any suspense thriller. Everyday dramas play out around the kitchen tables or in the bedrooms of family homes. In fact, generally speaking, the more life is presented as “perfect” to the outside world, the more we find very strange goings-on behind closed doors. We only have to look to the bizarre and dubious private behaviour of high-profile people in public life to attest to this. Of course, such behaviour is not confined only to those in the public eye. Individuals who on the face on it are normal, professional, respectable family people can just as easily turn out to be sinister and deviant. Perhaps this is exactly why domestic noir is so powerful. It’s unsettling precisely because it lies darkly somewhere between the creepy and the familiar.
Plenty of online sites now make it possible for travellers to stay in the home of a perfect stranger. But as the characters in Twisted River discover, there can be a darker side to this type of arrangement. While there is much to commend it – not least that it makes economic sense, the house-swap certainly challenges notions of privacy. In an age where social media smudges the edge of personal space, for most people their home still remains their castle – somewhere where they can pull up the drawbridge at the end of the day. And despite assurances and safeguards from websites, when arrangements such as house-swaps are conducted on the web, what guarantees do we really have that people are who they say they are, or indeed that they are the owners or occupants of a property in question?
My student son nearly fell foul of a rental scam as he looked for accommodation in Dublin last August. He received what in retrospect was an unsolicited email purporting to be from a renter on a rental site. The renter had a particularly well-appointed apartment for rent in city-centre Dublin. Although still with an eye-watering monthly price tag, it was significantly more reasonable than anything else my son had seen. In addition, all the utilities were included in the monthly rental. It looked like my son had lucked out. The email correspondence was well-constructed, polite and professional, but there were a few turns of phrase that jarred. Feeling there’s merit in the old adage “If it looks too good to be true…” we set to and performed some due diligence. It turned out that the renter was guilty of identity theft, and was not the owner of the apartment advertised. In my son’s haste to secure somewhere to live in Dublin we had narrowly avoided handing over a sizeable deposit.
Curious things can happen when you travel and some of the inspiration for Twisted River came from the more bizarre things that have happened to me while travelling. On one particular business trip, I returned to find the grounds of the English country house where I was staying swarming with police. The hotel manager accompanied me to my room in an annexe on the grounds, explaining the police presence was due to the arrival of golfing celebrities. The local TV news bulletin in my hotel room told a different story. When challenged, the police in the corridor outside my room confirmed that the couple stabbed to death in the murder/suicide on the news bulletin were in the room right next door to mine. The violent events had taken place the previous night as I’d slept.
On another occasion while on a business trip to Long Island, I missed the company-arranged transport back to JFK for my flight home and had to use the services of a freelance taxi driver. The car that arrived wasn’t in great shape. Neither was its owner. When the driver learned that I was a technical writer, his alarming driving became even more erratic. He threatened to abduct me so that I could write his memoirs and tell of his experience of US government conspiracies. He claimed the US government was denying all knowledge of US soldiers trapped on the border between Laos and Vietnam. He also maintained there were efforts to poison him while on his way to fight the drugs war in South America. I managed to persuade him to get me as far as JFK whereupon I made a swift exit and left him shouting and kicking at his car in a rage.
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, and who among us does not count the planning and anticipation of a holiday part of the holiday pleasure? Looking at brochures, poring over TripAdvisor, and planning itineraries can sometimes be more fun than the holiday itself. So, despite my own personal reluctance to do a house-swap to date, should the right château in France or beachfront villa in the Hamptons come along, I could be open to persuasion.
Twisted River by Siobhán MacDonald was published on April 18th by Canelo, £1.99 as an eBook
