BOOK REVIEW: ​ORMESHADOW BY PRIYA SHARMA

Following the reading of her collection All The Fabulous Beasts, Sharma was added to a very short list of mine; that of the automatic pre-order. So it was that my paperback of Ormeshadow arrived a couple of days before Fantasycon 19. I read the novella mostly on the journeys to and fro, and was lucky enough to get the author to sign my copy at the con itself (where Fabulous Beasts deservedly won ‘Best Short Story Collection’).

Ormeshadow is a novella suffused with the harshness of rural life, and the claustrophobia of village life. As someone who spent most of his childhood in such places, I found myself affected  powerfully by the evocation of that landscape, both geographically and socially. The story begins with Gideon, a boy of 10, being relocated from a city life with his mother and  father to the family farm his dad abandoned to his brother, but has now through circumstance been forced to return to.
 
Archetypes abound, both character and narratively speaking; the relationship between the two brothers, Gideon’s father the intellectual, but also with deep emotional intelligence (albeit also with quite staggering blind spots), his brother Thomas surface-stoic, man of the earth, but with seething resentments and simmering rage just under the surface. Sharma takes these archetypes and breathes incredible life into them, rendering them vividly. One of the many many brilliant things the novella does is allow dialogue and descriptions of tone, facial expressions and body language to convey often deep and conflicting character emotions,painting for the reader exquisite character portraits of often deeply troubled people.
 
Sharma also manages to pull of the incredible trick of allowing the narrative arc to follow the contours of plotlines that date back to antiquity, whilst still delivering shocks and surprises within that framework. A palpable sense of doom and crushing inevitability hung over me from the opening scene, and part of the strange pleasure of the novella was feeling that dread settle over my mind as the story unfolded.
 
Sharma’s use of language is breathtaking; she is utterly surefooted, allowing the simplicity of Gideons point of view to set the tone, and yet, through his wide open eyes, showing us things he sees and hears but doesn’t yet have the capacity to understand. In fact, one of the principal sources of dread becomes the awful knowledge that Gidion will eventually have to share in the revelations the reader has been privy to.
 
Ormeshadow is a tightly woven tale about the darkness that can lurk and fester so easily inside people who’s horizons have been brutally shortened by circumstance. It is a powerful and deeply moving coming of age story. It is exquisitely written. It is haunting in both its sense of place and people shaped by place.
 
It is masterful, and if your spirit is strong, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
 
KP
21/10/19

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