Children of Epiphany

Children of Epiphany
Frances Oliver
2004, Ash-Tree Press
ISBN: 1-55310-067-0

Children of Epiphany is a story of the uncanny rather than of the horrible; it is a quietly haunting tale of crumbling Greek villages and desperately self-absorbed expatriates, of peasant superstitions and modern spiritual vampirism. The novel was first published Secker & Warburg in 1983, and Ash-Tree Press is reissuing it now to coincide with the release of Oliver's new collection, Dancing on Air.

Tamsin is a teenager in a foreign colony in a small Greek island. She lives with her mother, Lisa, and her mother's current husband, Robert. Lisa is an artist given to dramatic outbursts, and Robert is a writer retreating into the bottle as a defense against his ongoing writer's block. When Signor Morelli flirtatiously offers Lisa the use of his Pirgos, a 400-year-old fortified watchtower in the remote reaches of the island, she leaps at the chance to live in rent-free luxury and give her husband a chance to finally buckle down to his work. Tamsin, on the other hand, is less pleased at the thought of being pulled away from her friends in Katapola. Besides, she's lived with her mother's whims long enough to know that nothing will change, no matter where they go.

This time, she's wrong.

Their next-door neighbors in remote Melaniki are Anna, a crazy woman who bursts onto her balcony to sway and mumble when the chuch bells ring the hour, and Anna's caretakers, young Heleni, handsome Petros, and their mother, Sophia. The village holds few other people to alleviate Tamsin's boredom, however — a handful of old men and women, the madman who rings the abandoned monastery's bells, and Hugo, another expatriate who lives in a ruin above the ravine and quickly becomes a regular visitor at the Pirgos. Nobody else lives in the village, and many of its houses are mysteriously abandoned, especially along the ravine.

Hugo soon tells them stories about the Pirgos and the "Children of Epiphany," born between Christmas and the Epiphany feast. These children, it's said, have no souls, and must drain the souls of others to make up for their loss. Heleni and Petros are two, he says. Tamsin scoffs at the superstition, but she senses that something is wrong in Melaniki. Who is Anna, and why does Signor Morelli pay for her care? Why are the houses around the ravine abandoned? Who left a family's belongings strewn carelessly down the ravine, and why hasn't anyone scavenged them? And why does the ravine itself give her nightmares?

As Tamsin becomes increasingly aware of the dark undercurrents threatening her family, she finds that she must engage with evil on two fronts: the physical and the psychological. She also learns that she is not, herself, as innocent of evil as she believed.

Oliver's novel is a thoughtfully written descent into the unknown; like Shirley Jackson, Oliver frightens with allusion and suggestion, pulling monsters from the mind rather than from the grave. As its title suggests, Children of Epiphany addresses the loss of the soul, not only to uncanny creatures of legend but also to the contemporary vampires of desperation, alcoholism, anorexia, and loneliness. Evil, Oliver tells us, is not crass and flashy, but quiet and secretive, a gently tugging vortex of psychological distress that draws its victims under before they even realize they are in danger. Keith Minnion's cover captures this theme well: The emptiness of the doors and windows of the forsaken houses is reflected in the hollow, hungry eyes of the ghostly children —and, perhaps, in too many of the faces we see around us every day.

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