The wind.” Tara should be 36, but she looks 16, and dental analysis confirms that impression. “She smelled of something belonging to the outdoors he couldn’t identify. “She hardly seemed to have aged,” Tara’s 40-year-old brother notices as he hugs her. ‘Some Kind of Fairy Tale’ by Graham Joyce ( Doubleday) Or for six months, according to that other calendar. For it is there, Tara reveals, that she has been dwelling for two decades.

Throughout the novel, this flat, economical style is relieved by rapturously lyrical passages as the narrative shuttles back and forth between the known world and the other world. An acute observer of domestic detail, he keeps us firmly planted in the Martins’ tidy English reality even as that reality is abruptly shaken. Yet Joyce’s description of it is wonderfully deadpan. A young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, gazed back at him from behind dark glasses. . . Dell had to release a small chain and unlock the inner door before opening the porch door. Tara Martin, now missing for 20 years, disappeared as a teenager while walking in the nearby woods.īut suddenly she is back: “Most people rang the electrical bell, but today someone was knocking. . “Feared it and detested it.” Ritual freshens memory, in this case the memory of a lost daughter. “It was the cheers moment, that gentle touching of the crystalware, that Dell hated the most,” Joyce writes.

Dell and Mary Martin, an elderly couple, sit down to their traditional Christmas lunch. The novel opens on Christmas Day in a small town in the English Midlands.

And Joyce’s fairy tale is one of dark and dangerous collision. “There is always a terrible and peculiar kind of accounting,” one character observes of the retribution carried out when the magical realm collides with our own. Joyce’s imagination, however, is far darker than that.

So far so bad, you might say, fearing a saccharine tale infested with petal-clad sprites. At the heart of Graham Joyce’s new novel, “Some Kind of Fairy Tale,” is a familiar, even shopworn, notion: That our everyday reality is not the only reality that alongside this world there exists another, magical world.

A Walk in the Dark by Joyce Stranger