Review: The Edge of Normal

by Carla Norton (MacMillan)

You may remember a case, in the US last year, where three young women, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight, were rescued from the home of their captor, Ariel Castro.

They had been missing for 10 years. Malnourished, regularly raped and viciously assaulted, between them the women had suffered miscarriages and, one had a 6-year-old daughter.

As the mother of two daughters, I cannot begin to even think how I would react to such a monster, should I get my hands on the like. It would not be pretty.

Carla Norton, author of The Edge of Normal, a disturbing thriller, is a journalist who covered the case of Colleen Stan, a 21-year-old who was abducted by a couple, in 1977. Kept for seven years, she was held in a coffin-like box under the couple’s bed, for much of the time. The horrific and bizarre case became known as “the girl in the box”. Norton also wrote a book about the case.

So the author knows her stuff and this story, the stuff of nightmares, is an intense read.

Reeve is a former captive, still struggling to put her four years, enslaved by sadist Daryl Wayne Flint, on the back burner. She was just 12 when Flint took her, now, at 22, Reeve has been asked by her psychiatrist, Dr Ezra Lerner, to help Tilly, another young “sex slave’ victim who, recently, escaped her captor. Lerner hopes that Reeve’s similar experience will help Tilly with her long healing process. Although the still fragile Reeve is worried that her own healing will take a step backward if she gets involved, she finds herself bonding with Tilly.

And then Tilly drops a bombshell, a secret about another sadistic monster out there somewhere. But, Reeve has promised not to tell anyone and the secret will impact on two more missing teenagers.

Short, sharp chapters and the fact that we know who the perpetrator is, from the outset, (hence the reader is pulled into his horribly fascinating and twisted thought process), give this psychological thriller a cutting edge. And if the violent denouement is a little far fetched, it still cheered me immensely...