![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When the novel opens, Marion has just been awakened by a scream, a sound that “flapped its wings against the inside of her skull.” She knows where the scream is coming from, and she even knows, although perhaps only subconsciously, why someone might be screaming inside her house, but she tamps down the feeling by calling forth her mother’s voice, which she knows would tell her that “John is doing the very best for them you have to trust him – he is your brother and a very clever person.” He, after all, had gone off the Oxford, and she had limped through school, barely able to understand the most basic things. She’d learned at a young age that she was plain, and spent most of her life living in John’s considerable shadow. She is mostly friendless, surrounds herself with stuffed animals, and spends her days watching sappy television movies, remembering events from her past, and imagining a future which she surely never had access to. There is something very odd going on in their house, a house filled with the bric-a-brac of a childhood spent in some luxury (the Zetlands owned a textile mill), and now the domain of a couple hoarders.Ĭatherine Burns’s debut novel The Visitors focuses the story on Marion. The siblings, now in their 50s, have never been especially close, but now that both their parents have died, they have to rely on each other and their relationship is a sort of co-dependent nightmare. Marion Zetland lives with her older brother, John, in a house that’s seen better days in a coastal town in Northern England. ![]()
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