The Leaves Forget by Alan Baxter

Publisher – Absinthe Books

Published – Out Now

Price – £18.00 hardback (ebook to come)

Olivia has been missing for months. Her family have tried to accept that perhaps she’ll never be found, and they’ll never know what happened. So when her brother Craig unexpectedly receives a stack of letters from Liv, all written not long after her disappearance, he’s both excited and frightened. Reading through her correspondence, Craig begins to get a sense of where she was, but he still doesn’t know where she is now, or if she’s still alive. Using what clues he can from the old letters, Craig sets off with his partner and his father to find Olivia, hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

There is always an element of surprise getting a letter these days. But as with any message while some may be just about being late home, shopping or can you please stop tempting books sometimes you’ll get a message that grabs you in a more serious way. That grabs your heart and makes you take a sharp breath. Sometimes you need to help and sometimes, possibly the worst if when you realise what you can see happening is not what the writer does. In Alan Baxter’s brilliant horror novella, The Leaves Forget we get a brother finding his sister in in deep trouble; but he may be out of time to save her.

Craig is bracing for a Hobart-style winter. It has not been an easy year as his younger sister Liv has vanished. Always the family member most prone to whims and crazes he was initially surprised but so many months of radio silence has been disturbing. Then his next-door neighbour returns from a trip to Europe and announces that he has been sent a lot of wrongly addressed mail for Craig. Liv has written many letters for several months about what happened to her and when Craig realises that the meditation group that she is in sounds more like a dangerous cult he fears the worst, but can he find her when the trail is so cold?

This is a marvellous story demonstrating the power of structure, language and pacing to keep a reader’s attention. Primarily Craig is our narrator explaining the set up but then over half the book is Craig reading the letters and Liv’s voice mixed between (but over many months condensed). Baxter has done a great job of making the two voices distinguishable – Craig the cynical and mature older brother while Liv certainly initially she is the more jokey carefree younger sister – a little daft but lovable. What I really enjoyed is how in each letter we get Liv’s setting of various scenes and then Craig adds commentary sometimes sarcastic and sometimes angry or scared. It’s a great way to re-interpret scenes and creates the growing sense of unease and panic we also feel as Craig realises things are looking dangerous. Liv’s voice subtly alters from someone who feels they’ve discovered the next big way of living and perhaps that she has made a huge mistake. The letters take up half the book and we are made to get invested in the tale we pick up on the same danger signs Craig spots and so when Baxter plays with the letters there is a real lump in the throat minute.

The latter half of the book is a road-trip through Australia to find Liv that really flies along as we rush to try to save Liv. Interestingly Baxter creates a family group but of refreshingly different male characters. As well as Craig who rarely is the man of action, we have Craig’s partner Andrew who feels just as loving to Liv and supports the family all the way through. I also loved Craig’s Dad; a retired sixty-year-old who is smart, sensitive, caring and acts when he needs to.  It is too easy to go all gung-ho in some scenes, but this group is a mix of the dedicated and slightly vulnerable and in trouble way over their heads which gets the reader invested in their fate too. The slowly building supernatural angle of the tale darkens throughout and it means the gut-wrenching finale really hits hard and feels well earned. We’ve all been on this folk horror journey together and changed by it.

This is a novella where the storytelling is brilliantly constructed to grab us from page 1 and keep us on our toes and our anxiety levels high throughout. Baxter uses the letters in a really refreshing way that builds these characters that you’ll care for and the threats to them that we want to stop happening. Strongly recommended for horror fans as the season of spooky arrives.