WHISPERS OF A GYPSY

In Patten’s horror novel, a young boy deals with a supernatural family legacy.

At the beginning of the story, 12-year-old Dwight Skinner and his younger brother, Aaron, are playing a game. At their grandfather’s insistence, they’re taking turns tossing grapes into his open mouth. When one grape lodges in his throat and the old man starts to choke, Aaron is alarmed, but Dwight, who’s developmentally disabled, thinks it’s all just a game and keeps tossing grapes. After the grandfather dies and Dwight’s furious father locks him in his bedroom, a rock crashes through the window, and Dwight sees a shadowy figure down on the sidewalk. Dwight is certain that the apparition is his friend, his superpowered assistant, and when his enraged father makes to attack him and his mother, he seems correct: the dark figure brutally beats his father. “Deception was the heart of the Skinners’ safety for three generations,” readers learn. “Secrets, their mistress.” Now young Dwight is the latest inheritor of those secrets, which date back to the Nazi persecution of the Romani people (the book includes a “Warning to the Reader,” presumably in part referencing the epithet in the novel’s title, noting that the story includes “contextual negative descriptions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and wrong now. Rather than remove the content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future for society”). The author adroitly fleshes out this family drama, alternating scenes set in the past with present-day sections centered on the mysterious Mr. Mortimer, who has knowledge of forbidden experiments conducted by the Nazis on Jews and Romani—experiments that may be reaching an awful culmination in little Dwight. In well-paced scenes reminiscent of the best of Robert McCammon’s work, Patten blends science and dark magic in a story in which the most vulnerable of heroes must find a way to save his family. The prose can sometimes verge on purple (“A whip of warm wetness lashed and splattered Dwight’s face in painless surprise”), but the narrative’s well-stoked energy never flags.

A haunting and often genuinely moving modern horror tale.