Onyx reviews: The Folly by Gemma Amor

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 10/26/2024

The inciting incident is reminiscent of the Michael Peterson case popularized on the Netflix series The Staircase. A woman falls to her death in the family home when the only other person present was her husband. Was she pushed or was it an accident? A jury convicted Owen of murder. His lone supporter is his daughter, Morgan, who has campaigned relentlessly for his release. Finally, the day comes when she picks him up from prison after he served six years of a fifteen year sentence, exonerated of the crime after an appeal and a second trial.

Morgan, now forty-three, knows that popular opinion remains against her father, and she's broke, so she sells the family home and finds a position for Owen as caretaker of a multistory tower standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic in Cornwall. The house where her mother died has too much history for them to stay there any longer but their new home has its own baggage: The Folly (a characteristically British term for a building that has little or no practical purpose) has a reputation for people—including a famous writer—either falling or jumping to their deaths.

In the Folly, they will be mostly away from prying, suspicious eyes. Morgan doesn't mind the isolated location—the entire country has been in lockdown for the past couple of years due to the pandemic, following distancing regulations that are even more drastic than those in America. Many businesses have shuttered and the familiar pub culture has vanished. The man who hires her father to tend to the Folly—the job consists mostly of general upkeep and chasing off death tourists (as the trespassers are called)—arranges for regular food deliveries, so the duo doesn't need to leave the premises.

It doesn't help, though, that the Folly's central feature is a spiral staircase, a constant reminder of the way Morgan's mother died. Morgan has steadfastly believed in her father's innocence; however, now that they are forced to live together in close confines, cracks form in their relationship. Complicating matters is the appearance of a mysterious stranger who seems to be channeling her mother's spirit, provoking her to ask her father difficult questions. Owen is so uncomfortable in this post-pandemic world that he floats the idea of committing another crime so he will be incarcerated again.

This is a brooding, atmospheric and claustrophobic novella, essentially a two-hander with an interloper who threatens to throw their precarious relationship off balance. Morgan's struggle with the past and the new present is the book's focus, which Amor handles deftly. As so many other Gothic stories have demonstrated, isolation is not without peril. Long-held secrets have a way of bubbling to the surface when people are trapped in moody, dark places.