Black Mamba is a horror novel about grief and the bond between twins, as a father tries to deal with the strange figure his daughters see. After his wife Pippa's death, Alfie is struggling to care for his twin daughters. When they tell him they saw a man in their room, a man Alfie can find no trace of, he isn't sure what to do, especially when this shadowy figure, Black Mamba, starts interrupting the family's life. Alfie turns to Pippa's twin sister Julia, and psychotherapist and also dealing with the death of her sister, to try and unravel what the twins are doing, but they are drawn into a strange world of ghosts and belief.
The book is told from Alfie and Julia's points of view, moving between the present and glimpses of the past, especially Julia and Pippa's childhood, to build up a picture of a family grieving, but also a family, particularly Julia and Pippa's parents, caught up in belief. There's the rational world of psychotherapy and a less clear world of belief in demons and ghosts, through Julia's mother's church and her dead father's belief in mediumship. The book explores why people might believe in things, especially after loss, combining that with ideas of a cursed house and connections between twins.
I liked the atmosphere of this book, with an unnerving sense of whether or not there was something more supernatural going on or not, and the way it played on ideas of what is a family. I felt like there could've been more about the church that Julia and Pippa's mother was part of, and they grew up as part of, as it felt like you never quite knew enough about it. However, the ambiguity of the book was also a strength, including the morality of many of the adults in the book, who are flawed and tied up in their own ideas, and the ending has an eerie chill, bringing together the ideas of doubleness found throughout.
If you like slow burn literary horror that focuses on grief and family, Black Mamba does that well, though it's not a book that is actually scary, but more lightly menacing. Some of the subplot twists are quite predictable, but the ending does leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth
The book is told from Alfie and Julia's points of view, moving between the present and glimpses of the past, especially Julia and Pippa's childhood, to build up a picture of a family grieving, but also a family, particularly Julia and Pippa's parents, caught up in belief. There's the rational world of psychotherapy and a less clear world of belief in demons and ghosts, through Julia's mother's church and her dead father's belief in mediumship. The book explores why people might believe in things, especially after loss, combining that with ideas of a cursed house and connections between twins.
I liked the atmosphere of this book, with an unnerving sense of whether or not there was something more supernatural going on or not, and the way it played on ideas of what is a family. I felt like there could've been more about the church that Julia and Pippa's mother was part of, and they grew up as part of, as it felt like you never quite knew enough about it. However, the ambiguity of the book was also a strength, including the morality of many of the adults in the book, who are flawed and tied up in their own ideas, and the ending has an eerie chill, bringing together the ideas of doubleness found throughout.
If you like slow burn literary horror that focuses on grief and family, Black Mamba does that well, though it's not a book that is actually scary, but more lightly menacing. Some of the subplot twists are quite predictable, but the ending does leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth