Towards the end of her second, The Answers, her main character, Mary, feels like “a stranger living as a stranger in a stranger’s body in yet another stranger’s home”. In her first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, Elyria goes to New Zealand in an attempt to erase herself from her own life. These monologues make sections of the book read like Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy blended with the creeping unease of Ari Aster’s horror film Midsommar.ĭespite their unique, even uncanny qualities, in many ways Pew is a typical Lacey narrator. Pew’s silence encourages others to project on to them, or simply talk at them as if they were a microphone. Some sections read like Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy blended with the creeping unease of the horror film Midsommar The detail that Pew “will get a blindfold just like everyone else” doesn’t provide the reassurance apparently intended. Rumours of human sacrifice are dismissed as children’s gossip, but other foreboding details are frankly acknowledged: a doctor tells Pew that “people tend to have more heart attacks and accidents and such” in the week beforehand. Lacey has always been an economical writer, and she is as taut as she’s ever been here: each of the book’s seven chapters is a day long and it moves relentlessly towards the Forgiveness festival, the nature of which remains menacingly unclear. It is weird, and Lacey has fun with the weirdness, using Pew to plumb the oddness and hypocrisies of this nameless, supposedly devout small town in the American south.