"The Fate of Katherine Carr" is a particular literary work and an opportunity to enter the dark world of Thomas H. Cook if you do not know it yet, through the lives of three people, wounded people, even broken , as always with Cook.
George Gates, the narrator merely survive since the assassination of his son Teddy there a few years ago; the horror of events mixes a haunting guilt that he never raised. Katherine Carr is a poet who disappeared twenty years ago in mysterious circumstances ever; she is the author of a story whose heroine bears his name and which he hopes George will deliver the key to the mystery. Finally, Alice is a little girl with progeria, whose days are numbered and that George is trying to unravel the mysterious fate of Katherine Carr.
This novel is beautifully constructed, stories fitting as nesting dolls, with mises en abyme that make it a bit complex: we really know if it's Katherine's story is told, or character Katherine in his own novel, or that of Alice perhaps, or why not the narrator, but regardless, eventually. What matters are the recurring themes in the work of Cook and come back here at all levels of the story: the obsession of absolute evil, innocence, guilt, infinite blackness with no possible redemption, the absence in response to questions at the suffering-whether that of the victims of human violence or violence by nature, as the disease Alice suffers.
Paradoxically, I felt some frustration, closing the book, because the reader is not rewarded with clear answers at the end of this subtle puzzle, and yet I could not rid myself of the feeling of having read something infinitely beautiful, where the strongest human emotions and painful are expressed in a lyrical prose of the highest quality. "Haunting" is probably the adjective that best applies to the works of Thomas H. Cook, because they are hard to forget and that each of its releases makes us want to dive back into his world as bitter as it may be .
