This book is that feeling in words. It's visceral. It's stomach churning. It's horrifying. It's dread, and damp, and stale, and fusty. Aoileann’s mother and grandmother exist as emotionally empty human shells, whilst her father is so consumed by self-loathing, having convinced himself that he is the sole victim of this terrible tragedy, that Aoileann has grown up with only the company of the treacherous thoughts which race around in her own mind. Where I End is Sophie White’s first piece of literary fiction, published last month. I read all the content warnings about this book but nothing could have prepared me for how disturbing it was. Bloody hell! Purely by coincidence I’ve just read another horror set in Ireland - The Creeper by A.M.Shine. That was also a brilliant read but together they’ve put me right off visiting Ireland!! For me personally, this unconventional, unique, intriguing and oh! so dark storyline, takes edge-of-the-seat thriller writing to a whole new level, especially when I arrived at the section in my reading which I recognised as being the source of inspiration for the book’s eerie cover art.

The actual footprint this story occupies is quite finely focussed, however the narrative surrounding the physical appearance and ‘feeling’ of specific locations is wonderfully descriptive, creating excellent enhanced visual awareness, for any confirmed ‘armchair travellers’ who are brave enough to visit. During the early chapters, I found myself musing that there were parallels between this book and The Colony by Audrey Magee, with both set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland and featuring a resident artist character. I think they make good companion reads but do steel yourself for some seriously disturbing content. It seems useless to even try in this hateful place. The thing in the bed may even have the right idea: to succumb, to beg, to be ended. The thing in the bed is maybe privy to something. Or perhaps is just more willing than the others to face what this place is capable of.Where I End is an exceptionally unsettling but beautiful tale about the horrors that come in the every day for an isolated and stunted teenager called Aoileann. It's also about motherhood, the private disasters people endure, and the difference between living, surviving, and merely existing.

Aoileann has never encountered a Mother or Mothering. There are references to her heartbreaking younger attempts at mother-daughter interaction with the "bed-thing", and how that connection was never found with Móraí either. Aoileann has grown up never witnessing closehand a Mother, or a woman's existence. She's taken in with Rachel, like sea-swimmers are with the bite of the ocean. Three generations of a family live together in the remote house closest to the cliffs, Aoileann, the 19 year old narrator, Móraí, her reticent grandmother, and Aoileann’s mother, the survivor of a disaster that the family has kept secret. Between them, they care for almost every need of the mother, and over time this has built an intense hatred of her within her daughter. They made the trip to investigate. The note-taker recorded a little of what went on during the questioning. We were brought to the island’s rudimentary ‘cemetery’ (located on the island’s high exposed north east side, see marked map on file). The practices around burial are unusual. We are told by Rionach (girl, about 17) that they cannot dig the island – at its deepest the soil layer is barely a forearm’s length – hence their ‘solution’. Island children play in the area and appear unfazed by the macabre spectacle to be found there. Rionach intimates that the island suffers losses of this scale frequently due to the dangerous nature of fishing the surrounding waters. When it was pointed out that if this were the case, then the island’s population would have died out long ago, the girl ceased to cooperate.It's also human, and raw, and describes the horror and fear of motherhood better than anything I've ever read. I do think this book may be a hard read for people who are family carers, and therefore I wouldn't recommend it to these people. There are some moments in this that made me so uncomfortable due to the way Aoileann and her grandmother treated her mother - they kept her as comfortable as possible, and cared for her in the way they knew how but there were moments that made you truly wonder if she was trapped in a terrible silent prison of her own self. And as Aoileann's obsession deepens, her behaviour towards her mother becomes more resentful and cruel. Aoileann lives on the most rural part of a small, hostile island, cut off from the local community. Her paternal grandmother rules the roost; her shattered, guilt-ridden father comes and goes; and her mother - or what's left of her - lies bed-bound, silent, staring, gaping. They are survivors of a devastating catastrophe; an incident that has made them outcasts, despite being islanders themselves.