"They kept themselves safe from the faceless ones. They warded them off. Whereas now... now the faceless ones are not a metaphor at all. Now they are real. Real men, whose faces have been shot or torn or burnt away, by other men ... [loc. 1699]
The setting is (mostly) the Sussex village of Haltington in the aftermath of WW1. Florence Stock has come to live with Dr Manning, her widowed brother-in-law who's the vicar of Haltington, and her teenage niece Phoebe. Kit Clayton, home from Paris after a year or so of creating lifelike tin and enamel masks for facially disfigured men, has moved into the Bone House: not as macabre as it sounds, but the former home of the Bone family, now extinct.
Mrs Bone's sons all died in the War, and the old woman dies up on the downs, trying to fulfil her familial duty to the Face, which local folklore says protects the village from thurlath -- 'a wandering, hungry thing that resembles a man but is not a man. They are hollow in the sense that they have no soul, and hollow in the sense that they are hungry.' And they crave faces: they steal the appearance of a person. 'You will have noticed that there are no effigies in Haltington Church...' (That's from Dr Manning's self-published work on the mythology and folklore of the area.)
Incidental characters, such as Phoebe's teacher Beatrice, provide context for the plot, and the setting: only one girl in ten will marry, because so many men are dead. Women who worked during wartime are now at loose ends. Florence is excited to see men's shirts hanging on the line at the Bone House -- until she realises that Kit Clayton is a woman.
I've enjoyed Collins' other novels (especially The Binding) but this didn't work as well for me. Though there is a supernatural element, that aspect of the novel doesn't really bloom until the last third of the book. Florence's doomed love, Kit's solitary misery and Phoebe's smiling malice are vividly written but not especially cheering, and the focus remains very much on those three women -- which means that some plot threads, unwitnessed by any of them, are given only cursory resolutions. Some of the secondary characters feel superfluous, too, included only to explain an aspect of the plot. But there's a surprisingly, believably happy ending, and some truly scary moments along the way.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the review copy: UK Publication date is 25th September 2025.
The title comes from Eleanor Farjeon's poem Peace, which is quoted at the start of the novel:
Nations! whose ravenous engines must be fed
Endlessly with the father and the son,
My naked light upon your darkness, dread! -
By which ye shall behold what ye have done...
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