Slivers

As children Felix and Louise, brother and sister, are inseparable. Everything changes when, on holiday, they are approached by the father of their playmates. He seems to catch the children playing sexual games, but there is every sign that he’s taking advantage of the situation.

After that, nothing is ever the same. Felix’s mental health gradually declines and he starts to hear voices: a nagging voice, a bullying voice, and a dirty voice that whispers all kinds of obscenities to him. Louise, who likes to be in charge, enjoys feeding her brother's fears. Her manipulative games drive him further and further into psychological isolation.

At the start of the book we meet Felix in his forties. He has withdrawn to a remote hut in the woods and completely lost his ability to distinguish between reality and illusion. It was on Louise’s advice that he secluded himself from the world, after his stepdaughter Ellie made a drawing at kindergarten of herself in the bath with him. Paranoid, Felix waits for Ellie’s return while trying to escape the voices in his head.

In ‘Slivers’ Lenny Peeters plays a brilliant game with chronology and perspective. In a story that topples at an accelerating pace, the reader is challenged to discover the truth. Extremely unreliable narrators and suggestive dialogues reveal a terrifying and hideous universe full of ambiguity and gritty images. Peeters makes us feel Felix’s mental dislocation, while Louise’s manipulative obsessions come increasingly to the foreground. ‘Slivers’ is a novel that gradually takes possession of you and pulls you into a dark world that induces both disgust and fascination.