Trick or Treat (Paperback)

Lesley Glaister has a unique way of unveiling the past as it does its fearful work in the present, and in this novel her intimate eavesdropping on her characters' thoughts and actions makes us feel we know these people from the inside out. This is a novel about old age and how we never forget the wrongdoing of years ago; about family secrets and secret feuds, about emotions boiling over behind net curtains. Dependent 17-stone Olive lives happily with partner Artie in a small terraced house. They are old and live in the past when they were members of the Anti-Nazi League. Then Olive seduced the men with her gypsy looks and voracious sexuality, and she and Artie defied convention by living in sin. Two doors away is obsessive widow Nell, once Olive's classmate and friend, now her sworn enemy. And between these elderly rivals live Petra and her three children. The young family, especially the sensitive boy Wolfe, unknowingly inflame the long-standing enmity between Olive and Nell, and when Nell's paedophile son, Rodney, comes home from prison to live with his mother the children are exposed to great danger. Glaister details Nell's cleaning obsession with relish and the drift into old-age forgetfulness is movingly portrayed. But there is a threat of malice hanging over all the characters and fear is never far away. Hugely satisfying, the novel doesn't shrink from the ugliness of hatred but deals with it understandingly, even if a cackling laugh is never far away. (Kirkus UK)

In Glaister's second skillful, blackly comic gothic-y novel, two neighboring grotesque and touching cuckoos are nudged into eye-bugging public displays. It all takes place in a modest corner of an English city, and, as in Glaister's Honour Thy Father (1991), there's a nasty bit of the past to be exhumed, plus doom on the way, but here there's also considerable warmth and good humor. Eight-year-old Wolfe, unhappy with itchy skin and the name his generally loving, heavily pregnant, hippie mother Petra burdened him with, misses the commune and learns to say "things are in a state of flux." Next door to Wolfe are Olive and nice, grandfatherly Arthur. The pair have been together for years but never married, on principle, as old leftist activists. Olive, once a lush rose of a powerful, sexy magnetism, is now a bubbling mass of confusion and emotive storms within a mound of obesity. Arthur, adoring, cares for this impressive ruin. On the other side of Wolfe's family is ancient Nell, a frenzied nerve of inanity who lives to clean and disinfect. But what to do with her son Rodney, returned after many years (some in jail) and crawling with germs? Before Nell's scouring potential goes off the dial, there'll be a confrontation with Olive - whom Nell has hated since schooldays - at a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire and picnic in Wolfe's yard. Subsidiary fireworks abound, involving a prize cup, a bat with cherries, and a sizzling altair in the long-ago. There'll also be treats for Wolfe, dirty, dirty tricks, two deaths, and, at the close, a massive final cleansing boom. Glaister snaps her old birds in midflight in witty flashes: As nervous Nell awaits visitors on Halloween, "her knees are locked together and her cars are on stalks." In all: a cool, sure, bright entertainment. (Kirkus Reviews)

'Glaister has the uncomfortable knack of putting her finger on things we most fear, of exposing the darkness within' --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.