For the last few years, Miller has written her mother Sylvie out of her life. The woman is a narcissist, a controlling force, a force of nature. However, while approaching the wedding to her beloved Florence, Miller finds herself longing for some kind of family connection. Her father died years ago. She has no real extended family. Her side of the church is going to be empty.
So, when Sylvie makes contact, asking for a chance to get away with her daughter, to reconnect, Miller ignores her instincts to tell the woman no and agrees. This might be what they both need. Florence does not agree, but she’s supporting her future spouse.
From the moment Sylvie arrives, she’s up to her old tricks. Ribbing her daughter for making her wait for twenty minutes or bullying Miller into putting her bag on the floor because it might be dirty, dragged in road salt. Trying to gaslight her daughter into accepting blame for things she hasn’t done while positioning herself in a guilt free place. This is before they head off for their weekend getaway at a cabin, and it bodes a miserable time.
At first, Miller yields to her mother. She will not do so forever. And when they arrive at the cabin to find that it’s been decorated to exactly look like the home they shared when Miller was a little girl, things go from upsetting to eerie. Unsettling. And when Sylvie talks about the three of them becoming a family again, does she mean herself, Sylvie, and Florence … or someone else?
Miller soon finds herself terrified of the woman who brought her to this weird place. No one knows quite where they are, and no one will be coming along if things go truly, unforgettably bad, and there’s a terrible snowstorm out there that has trapped these two people in this remote and isolated locale. What will Miller need to do to get home again? Some unpleasant things, it turns out … And she will have to endure some serious torment as well. Author Caitlin Marceau weaves a twisty and twisted tale of psychological horror and suspense with the slim yet propulsive suspense novella, This is Where We Talk Things Out.
I had not encountered either Caitlin Marceau’s works or DarkLit Press books until chancing upon a post they made on social media celebrating cover artists. This book turned out to have one of the covers they championed (it comes from artist Val Haverson), and it caught my eye. Why not give it a shot, I thought.
So glad I did.
Caitlin Marceau has a knack for delivering characters we want to see succeed as well as those we revile at first sight. While This is Where We Talk Things Out does not have a lot of room for surprising twists in the latter sorts—Sylvie is awful, and she only gets more so over time, we cannot sympathize with her because there’s not even a glimmer of light left in her—the book remains a thrilling example of both character study and drama that is unafraid to peer into the dark. It’s damn near impossible to put down and short enough to invite us to finish it in a single setting no matter what kind of damage that does to our bedtime schedules (or nerves).
This novella is a gem of dark suspense, which also manages to have plenty to say about the ways mothers and daughters relate (or not), and how families that truly come apart can never come back together in anything remotely resembling the shape they had in fond memory. As Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel was titled, You Can’t Go Home Again. With a situation like the one in This is Where We Talk Things Out, we discover that sometimes it is best not to even try.
The writing is propulsive, drawing us into the situation and characters quite nicely. Unnecessary repetition occasionally creeps up, which can be distracting for people who pay attention to the prose at a sentence-by-sentence level.
The author is not afraid to make use of sentence fragments to nab our interest, interrupting a flow of thought with a broken intruder of an idea, that gets rejected before it has time to fully gel. There is a recurring phrase throughout this book, “I wish it had been—” which is both a tease about some incident in the characters past but also a sly encapsulation of one of themes of the book: We all spin illusions about the past, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, and that untrustworthy bastard memory only aids and abets such illusion-crafting.
Consider this bit where we first see Miller and Sylvie interacting. It’s amazing how quickly the shoe drops, and the situation goes from hesitantly hopeful to irritating to disquieting thanks to passivity butting heads with passive aggressiveness:
[Miller] pushes open the first set of glass doors, the entrance significantly colder than the lobby, before opening the second set and heading out into the parking lot. It’s cold out, and even though it’s exactly as frigid as she’d planned for, the brisk air still manages to surprise her.
Her mom honks twice at her—Miller’s not sure if Sylvie’s worried she won’t be able to find the familiar red car in the half-empty parking lot or if she’s urging her daughter to walk faster—and waves at her through the glass. As Miller approaches the Yaris, Sylvie pushes on a button by the window and the vehicle clicks as the doors unlock. She opens her window a crack, clearly not wanting to expose herself to the below-zero air more than she has to.
“Just put your stuff in the back seat. I already have things in the trunk.”
“Okay.”
The window hums as it closes.
Miller opens the back door on her mother’s side.
“Oh, put it on your side,” Sylvie tells Miller, turning to look at her over her shoulder. “I like having my purse behind me in case I need it.”
“Okay.” Miller closes the door and walks around to the passenger’s side, opens the back door, and puts her duffel bag on the seat.
“Can you put it on the floor? I don’t want you getting dirt on the seat.”
“Why would I get dirt on the seat?”
“In case you dragged your bag on the ground or something. I don’t want you getting road salt on the upholstery.”
“Why would I drag my bag on the ground?” Miller asks, confused by Sylvie’s train of thought.
“I don’t know! But hurry up, you’re freezing out the car!”
Miller wants to argue, but she isn’t sure if it’s because Sylvie’s request is unreasonable (it isn’t) or if it’s because she’s used to pushing back against whatever her mother says (she is), so she bites her tongue and puts the duffel bag on the floor of the car before getting into the passenger’s seat.
“Hi!” Sylvie cries, as if the last minute of conversation never happened. She unbuckles her seatbelt and leans across the small space to give Miller an awkward one-armed hug. While it’s far less enthusiastic on her side, Miller returns the gesture.
“Hey.”
“I’m so glad you agreed to come out for the weekend. So glad! It’s going to be great!”
“Yeah, it’ll be nice to get away from the city,” Miller says unconvincingly. “Where exactly is the cabin, by the way? Florence wants to know.”
“Why?” Sylvie’s tone is immediately different at the mention of Florence’s name. “So she can show up uninvited in the middle of our time together?”
“No. So she knows where I’m going to be all weekend.”
“It’s up north.”
“I know it’s up north, but where up north?”
Sylvie shrugs. “I don’t know the exact township because it’s between two of them.”
“Okay,” Miller says slowly, “but which two?”
“I can’t remember the names, but they’re French. Saint-Something-de-Something or whatever. I’ll have to check the map.”
“Okay… so check the map.”
“I’ll do it when we get there,” Sylvie says dismissively.
“Can you just do it now?”
“We’re already running late, Miller, because someone doesn’t know how to be on time,” she snaps, grabbing the gearshift and taking the car out of ‘park’ and putting it into ‘drive.’ “I was waiting for like twenty minutes.”
Miller frowns, pointing at the clock on the dashboard, the green light glowing softly against the black screen. “It’s not even three.”
“And I’ve been here since almost two-thirty,” Sylvie lies.
Miller exhales slowly and plasters a smile on. “Okay, we’ll check the map later.”
Sylvie nods enthusiastically and steps on the gas, moving the car out of its parking spot and towards the road. As much as Miller knows her mom is wrong, she knows whatever she says now will set the tone for the entire weekend. If she wants to make things work with Sylvie, and she really does, she knows she’ll need to swallow her pride and do everything she can to meet the woman halfway.
She just hopes she’s not the only one trying.
Sylvie pulls the Yaris out of the lot and towards the highway, and Miller watches as the condo fades from view in the rearview mirror. (This is Where We Talk Things Out, pp. 11-13)
The flow of the scene continually robs Miller from any opportunities to feel in charge. She is our point of view character, but she is shut down no matter what she tries to do. The maternal character is there, puffing herself up, offering outright cruelty disguised as an increasingly unreasonable set of requests, all delivered from the comfort of the driver’s seat. And will that refusal to check the map for location come back to bite Miller on the hind end? Why yes. It will. The protagonist and this person she has severed all ties with are heading into the snowy wilds without anyone having a clue as to their final destination.
Caitlin Marceau’s novella is a solidly entertaining read, balancing the kinds of creepy psychological breakdowns that the fuel familial dysfunction as well as the kinds of bad ideas that, if left to fester, can turn harmful both to the self and those around the self. The cover copy draws some comparisons to Stephen King’s Misery, and it’s not too difficult to sense a similar drama to that found between Annie Wilks and Paul Sheldon rattling along in Marceau’s text.
However, this novel is not simply Misery redux. Instead, the author adds in dollops of personality and quirk to the piece. It’s the sort of novel that grabs hold of the attention and practically demands its pages be turned while also allowing for lyrical and clever asides, such as, “And while Sylvie had a bad habit of extending poison ivy disguised as olive branches, Miller had a worse habit of accepting them.” (pp. 9-10)
This is Where We Talk Things Over has things to say about mothers and daughters. In it, Caitlin Marceau builds a creepy atmosphere not from shadows and whispers but from childhood recollection and average conversational tones. This is a book that turns the screws quite effectively, building suspense and a good old fashioned case of dread as we head toward the chilling climax.
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This is Where We Talk Things Out is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook editions.
Special mention needs to be made to the narrator of the audiobook version, Linda Jones. The reader manages to keep the character voices distinct without being cartoonish. Whether she actively chose to make Sylvie sound like Jane Fonda is unknown to me, but it works unbelievably well for the character, adding a subtle additional layer of chill as well.
“I Wish It Had Been: Caitlin Marceau’s This is Where We Talk Things Out” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the DarkLit Press eBook edition, released in 2022.
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