The Heart of a Child

by Adam Cosco

Rating: ****

Barbara and Teddy O’Brien desperately want to believe their daughter, Ava, an anxious, watchful eleven-year-old, when she breaks down and describes an alarming incident that occurred during the school day with her classmates.  

With no proof and unreliable witnesses, Barbara, along with almost everyone else, is inclined to dismiss Ava’s bizarre account of rituals and masked figures as a product of her daughter’s overwrought, febrile imagination, but Teddy is not so sure…

Cosco’s tightly wound and unsettling horror is split into two halves, ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ which are set twenty years apart. The opening, and indeed the entire first half, is a masterclass in tension, paranoia, and rising fear set within the simmering, suffocating atmosphere of the O’Brien household.

There is darkness and dysfunction within the family. Discordant resentment flickers between Barbara and Teddy, Ava’s acute, fearful sensitivity vibrates from the page, and the entire narrative is drenched in a claustrophobic, creeping unease.

The reader is privy to the fundamentals of what happened at the school with the principal, Angela Spire, and her son, Ruben.  However, as doubt is cast on Ava’s account and her classmates falter in corroboration, the reader begins to question whether the highly strung Ava is entirely dependable.

Cosco heightens this confusion by shifting the narrative back and forth between the children and parents with their frantic, frightened reactions, police interviews, and the seemingly bemused, composed Spires.

He also interleaves details of the unnerving interviews conducted by a child psychologist with several of the pupils, including Ava. All these disordered elements build a stifling, mentally cluttered version of events, complementing the main characters’ emotionally combustible states.

Cosco’s prose is deliberate and controlled yet peppered with visceral jolts and a tangle of symbolic suggestions. He writes with a focused intensity, and his descriptive language, especially in relation to Gregory Lighthill, the unctuous news reporter, is so insightfully sublime it borders on the amusing.

As the ‘Then’ section draws to a shocking close, Cosco homes in on Teddy. There is something damaged within him that may or may not be connected to what took place with Ava and which has horrendous consequences.

The second part of The Heart of a Child finds Ava as a divorced, single mother. She’s struggling financially and emotionally, haunted by past traumas and afraid for her seven-year-old daughter Olivia’s safety.

It’s a credible trajectory. Cosco competently pitches the narrative forward by two decades whilst still maintaining the earlier skin-crawling sense of a deeply malign agency swirling around Ava, whose vulnerabilities have increased with age. She becomes embroiled in a disturbing psychological game with several intriguing developments and revelations from the past and present.

Notwithstanding, the malevolent core of the novel lies with Angela Spire. Cosco depicts her with chilling brevity, enhancing the unknown to tease the reader with exactly who she is and what she might be capable of.

As the narrative gathers monstrous menace, so does Angela. Personally, I felt shivers of Rosemary’s Baby in the last parts of the novel, although the story is quite different. Further, Cosco sets the reader up for a couple of obvious conclusions in Ava’s personal life, yet brutally removes these.

There are a couple of areas with a touch of descriptive repetition, and Olivia occasionally grates. Cosco also engages in a slight conflict with several elements in the remaining pages but distills them neatly into the conclusion, which is somewhat unexpected and yet, given the unremittingly bleak and disquieting tone of the novel, is apt.

The Heart of a Child is an insidiously good little horror, slithering through the reader’s mind with predatory preternatural vibes. Highly recommended.

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