The Boy at the Keyhole
A Novel
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3.2 • 9 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“You’ll talk about this book with everyone you meet. It’s that exciting.”—Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box For fans of Shirley Jackson, Sarah Waters and Daphne du Maurier, an electrifying debut about a boy left alone in his family’s English estate with a housekeeper he suspects has murdered his mother
Nine-year-old Samuel lives alone in a once-great estate in Surrey with the family’s housekeeper, Ruth. His father is dead and his mother has been abroad for months, purportedly tending to her late husband’s faltering business. She left in a hurry one night while Samuel was sleeping and did not say goodbye.
Beyond her sporadic postcards, Samuel hears nothing from his mother. He misses her dearly and maps her journey in an atlas he finds in her study. Samuel’s life is otherwise regulated by Ruth, who runs the house with an iron fist. Only she and Samuel know how brutally she enforces order.
As rumors in town begin to swirl, Samuel wonders whether something more sinister is afoot. Perhaps his mother did not leave but was murdered—by Ruth.
Artful, haunting and hurtling toward a psychological showdown, The Boy at the Keyhole is an incandescent debut about the precarious dance between truth and perception, and the shocking acts that occur behind closed doors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Giles's nightmarish first novel for adults, after the children's novel The Death (and Further Adventures) of Silas Winterbottom: The Body Thief, nine-year-old Samuel Clay lives on an estate in Cornwall, England, with only the tyrannical housekeeper, Ruth Tupper, for company. Samuel's mother, a widow, has gone to America to take care of her late husband's business, having left at night without saying goodbye to Samuel. She does, however, send him postcards from America. But after four months, Samuel, who misses his mother, has begun to get ideas in his head (thanks to his hyper-imaginative schoolmate, Joseph): maybe his mother's been murdered by Ruth, who buried her body in the basement and has been getting a confederate in America to send those postcards to him. The more closely he observes Ruth, who perhaps has secrets to hide, the more firmly he comes to believe that his suspicions are true. But it's not until he actively begins to search for proof that Ruth's behavior really begins to seem suspicious. Told entirely from Samuel's point of view, the novel is so adeptly constructed and controlled that Ruth becomes a chilling study in ambiguity. Like Laird Koenig's cult classic The Little Girl Who Lives down the Lane, this novel dramatically tests the limits of youthful innocence when faced with adult mendacity.
