As a long-term Creep™, I thought I had a fairly good on handle on how dark Sophie could go. I greatly underestimated her, and while I really liked her other books, I feel like this is it, this is what she can write better than anyone else. The horror of humanity. I'd like to remember this book through the 3 main "themes", I guess, that stood out to me, using a quote that encaptures each. Sophie White is a novelist, essayist and podcaster from Dublin. She also holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from NCAD. She is the author of seven books and she is currently the Arts Council Writer in Residence in DCU. Undersocialised and unloved, Aoileann fantasises about a proper family and when Rachel, a young artist, arrives on the island with her infant son, Aoileann finds herself drawn to their unit and resolves to make herself indispensable to the tired, lonely mother. In Where I End, the bedbound parent is a mute and incapacitated mother, whose every need must be met by her teenage daughter, Aoileann, and mother-in-law, Móraí. Set in a remote corner of a remote island, the book is a horror about a young woman’s attempts to find motherly love, and to get to the bottom of family secrets that made her who she is. Ideas of care and neglect, isolation, family, and so on run throughout, though they are approached obliquely and it’s up to the reader to draw their own conclusions about what’s being said.

With bloodless, spidery hands, Islanders drew the frightened near-drowned from the shore and led them up to the island’s interior. When the first line of a novel starts ‘ My mother. At night, my mother creaks’, you know that this book is certainly going to be nothing like you have read for a while!I see the sea’s gleeful mutilation of the men as inevitable. The island is hostile; the seas murder the men and regurgitate them for us to see and know what’s coming for us all.’ I’ve always found that my children have spurred my creativity so much. I can’t even describe it exactly. But I just feel … the precipice of human experience is that delivery of a child and then witnessing the first moments of life. It’s really awesome, in the true sense of the word. Awe is the feeling I always have. And I think there’s such an urge when I have a young baby to tap into it and document it. I’ve always written through those times.”

When artist Rachel arrives on the island with her young son, Aoileann befriends her and begins to make herself indispensable in Rachel’s life. If you’ve read more than one review of Where I End, you’ll have seen it repeatedly described as visceral, gruesome, chilling, unsettling, dark, twisted, and horrific. These are also my descriptions of the novel. It is a novel full of body horror. It is also full of psychological horror. It is bone-chillingly disturbing and made my skin crawl multiple times.Encountering her is physically overwhelming. My body is opening to her with an exuberance I don't recognize. Her body arouses in me the same sense of altered state that the ocean does." Aoileann was honestly a scary character - she had been through so much, clearly she was deficient on the social front and had no idea how to interact with others or form normal attachment, and then she also had been the victim of assault from the island men. And then to live in a house that is more or less a prison on top of all of that. It's no wonder the beauty, simplicity and charm of Rachel obsessed her to the point of dangerous behaviour.