BOOK REVIEW: BLACK MAMBA BY WILLIAM FRIEND

6/6/2022

Invisible friends were never more unsettling…..

Invisible friends are a tricky phenomenon to get right in horror fiction and in reality characters from films spring more readily to mind than the printed page. Many of my favourites are from non-horror novels, ranging from Fight Club to the obscure Aussie novel Pobby and Dingan (Ben Rice) and freaky kid’s dark fantasy The Imaginary (AF Harrold). Last year Stephen Chbosky’s 700 pager Imaginary Friend brought the subject to the international bestseller charts, but in a brief 247 pages William Friend’s startling debut totally blows the bloated excesses of Imaginary Friend out of the water. Not a word is wasted in this tight novel which will have you turning the pages at speed whilst you forget to draw breath and twitch at the flicker of a shadow in a darkened bedroom.

I should get the weakest feature of this book out of the way straight away: the title. I hate it. Black Mamba sounds like a cross between an eighties action movie and a Quentin Tarantino character (which it is in Kill Bill). This title fails to sell the book as the exceptionally clever psychological horror novel it truly is. The blurb name-checks it against The Babadook (which if fair enough) but The Babadook has an ominous ring which Black Mamba totally fails to conjure, probably because it is so easily connected to a snake. Considering the unsettling presence the Black Mamba creates in the household of Alfie and his family it could have done with a more striking name, as even though we are crossing mediums it was every bit as good as The Babadook.

This was one of these books which could be equally enjoyed by both thriller and horror fans and does not rely upon cheap thrills, violence of exorcist style head-spinning for its unsettling moments. The action is all very realistic, quiet, subtle and character driven, for example, there was one excruciating scene where the social services appear at the family home after an incident at school which was so painful I was hanging on every word as the tension between the characters heightened. One of the truly outstanding features of Black Mamba was its sneaky use of ambiguity in the relation to the invisible friend, if your book is under 250-pages and the writer is as skilled as William Friend the reader is pulled by the nose before repetition sets in. Often such endings can be disappointing, but this is not the case with Black Mamba, which maintains its level of unease to the final pages. You will probably read the final paragraph more than once (I certainly did).

Imaginary friends aside, at the heart of Black Mamba lies an incredibly convincing cross-generational family drama, which at the outset seems like a normal unit trying to recover from a terrible personal tragedy. However, as the slow burning and shadowed events move on this intricate story goes much deeper as we find out more about Hart House and the startling events which preceded the family living there. The manner in which little tip-bits regarding the family are dropped into the plot are beautifully handled and help creative an unnerving atmosphere with the reader is never quite sure whether they are being fed the truth.

How can two very well-behaved twin little girls messing around with an invisible friend called ‘Black Mamba’ be so unsettling? It’s hard to explain, but once you have spent time with the family you will know exactly what I mean. The novel starts nine months after their mother Pippa died in a freak accident and the family is struggling to cope. Grief, undiagnosed trauma and pain oozes from the pages as Alfie cannot deal with losing Pippa, the love of his life. In the opening pages the twins wake Alfie and tell him there is a man standing at the bottom of their bed. ‘Black Mamba’ has made his first appearance and to say much more about the plot in this deeply psychological novel would spoil the twists and turns which lie ahead.

This stunning literary suburban chiller is seen from two points of view, Alfie and Pippa’s twin sister Julia, who is a psychotherapist struggling with her own demons after their joint devastating loss. Julia also has a tricky relationship with her mother who plays a key role in the plot, especially in her slightly off-kilter religious beliefs which lurk in the background. A great deal of the success of the novel revolves around the relationship between Alfie and Julia and how they manage the appearance of Black Mamba, especially since they are both suffering from a combination of grief and trauma which impacts how they perceive the twins. Although the novel is not seen from the point of view of the girls, the story does not throw any cheap shots by portraying them as evil devil children and is all the better for it because they are so believable and when one of them acts out of character, which happens on several occasions, it is truly startling.

It would have been easy to deliver a loud bombastic ending, instead a beautifully observed family drama, where all the participants are emotional wrecks, plays out. Both Alfie and Julia were sympathetic characters and the dream sequences were particularly striking with even the sudden movement of a shadow being played out with profound effect and atmosphere. I loved Black Mamba and recommend it very highly, interestingly one of the genuine gold standards of novels with invisible friends was Thomas Tryon’s classic The Other, which also had twins. Coincidence? I wonder….

Tony Jones

Black Mamba
by William Friend

Daddy, there's a man in our room...

This is the chilling announcement Alfie hears one night, when he wakes in his quiet, suburban house to find his twin daughters at the foot of his bed. It's been nine months since Pippa - their mother - suddenly died and they've been unsettled ever since, so Alfie assumes they've probably had a nightmare. Still, he goes to check to reassure the girls. As expected he finds no man, but in the following days the girls begin to refer to someone called Black Mamba. What seemingly begins as an imaginary friend quickly develops into something darker, more obsessive, potentially violent. Alfie finds himself struggling to cope, and so he turns to Julia - Pippa's twin and a psychotherapist - for help. But as Black Mamba's coils tighten around the girls, Alfie and Julia must contend with their own unspoken sense of loss, their unacknowledged attraction to one another, and the true character of the presence poisoning the twins' minds...

A darkling tale of tragedy, hauntings and sexual desire, Black Mamba is a novel of a father's love for his struggling daughters, and a widower's growing love for a woman after his wife's death. With smart, gothicky touches and a large and generous challenge to our assumptions of what and who constitutes a modern family, it explores both the limits we'll go to for our children and the sunken taboos of grief - of how erotics can still exist, and can even be life giving, after suffering loss.