Dan Chaon

Twisted Sister
Review of the Amazon Original Kindle eBook edition (June 27, 2019)

I noticed it most clearly when she began to show interest in boys. She didn’t act like the girls you read about in books, with their romantic diaries, worrying about clothes and hairdos and so forth. Instead there was a kind of wolfishness that I’d never seen in her before, something fierce and relentless and without logic, or at least not any logic that I could grasp.

I've read some good reviews recently about the Disorder series and realized that I hadn't finished reading all 6 stories myself, although there had been a few good ones and only one dud. So I circled back to catch The Beckoning Fair One. This was quite a good creepy story which builds a considerable amount of tension throughout as we read one young teenage boy's observations about the increasingly erratic behaviour of his older teenage sister.

You begin to anticipate that some sort of witchcraft or voodoo process is underway, but the final reveal is more alien than that. The finale is vague though and you don't completely understand what happens, so that kept it out of 5 territory for me. But the suspense buildup otherwise was well done.

The Beckoning Fair One is the 5th of 6 short stories/novellas in the Amazon Original Disorder Series. “Stories that get inside your head. From small-town witch hunts to mass incarceration to exploitations of the flesh, this chilling collection of twisted short stories imagines the horrors of a modern world not unlike our own.”

Trivia and Links
This short story title was quite unique and its reference to a painting was intriguing:

I used to pretend that the painting in the drawing room was our mother’s likeness—it was a portrait of a woman in a white nightgown, with long curling brown hair, and she stood in a foggy garden with her arm held out and her index finger extended. It was called The Beckoning Fair One, and Grandmother said it was painted in the 1800s by an artist named Sophronia Comfort Vale.

After some googling, it seems that no such painting or artist exist. There is however another short story titled The Beckoning Fair One (1911) by Oliver Onions (1873-1961). That is a ghost story which may have provided some inspiration for Dan Chaon.
The cover for one edition of the 1911 ghost story does feature a painting of a possible "beckoning fair one."
See cover image at https://ia801401.us.archive.org/25/items/beckoningfairone_2211_librivox/beckonin...… (more)

I'm giving this 4 stars because I couldn't stop reading it but I kind of hated it and I'm left here at the end thinking WTF was that crazy ride?

Mood currently is bleak after the Las Vegas shooting a day ago and reading this creepy and malevolent book kept me in a miserable mood and yet I kept reading. Weird formatting, nutzo characters, drug addled paragraphs, unreliable narrators galore. I *think* I know what happened in the end but really....who knows. I'm not even entirely convinced all the characters we met were real people.





… (more)