Fact: Twins are inherently creepy

This was on Goodreads list of finalists for horror of the year, but I was left rather unimpressed. Good premise, but poor delivery, in my opinion.

“Everything you say is absolutely right — the death of those we love is so much worse than our own death, and yes all love is a form of suicide, you destroy yourself, you surrender yourself, you kill something in yourself, willingly, if you really love.”

About 1 year after their 8 year old daughter Lydia died in an accident, Angus & Sarah move with their surviving daughter — Lydia’s twin, Kirstie — to a deserted island off the coast of Scotland. Determined to start over fresh, they work on rebuilding the deserted house and try to plant roots in their new home. But one day, Kirstie insists to Sarah that she’s not Kirstie — she’s actually Lydia. And then everything starts to fall apart.

There are lots of great horror books that have at their center something totally normally that’s falling apart — a marriage, a family, a house they can’t afford, etc. The Ice Twins tries to do that, but goes overboard — Angus & Sarah both come from deeply broken homes, their marriage has been rocked by infidelity and financial troubles and anger, Angus drinks too much, and so on. There’s just so much background and history shoved into a few hundred pages, that the creepy parts of the book — the twins, the mystery of the surviving daughter’s identity, the Scottish moors — get shoved to the background. This book should have either been twice as long, for the author to fully explore the many, many different elements of the novel, or he should have cut about half of the background noise.