Girl in the Walls, by A.J. Gnuse

Girl In The Walls is a metaphorical tale about an orphan girl and a granddaughter clock, both occupying a house in the grip of fate.

Girl In The Walls is an allegory. The story takes place in an old house, in many instances in hidden places, gaps between the walls, crawl spaces beneath the floors, an old laundry chute, and a hidden corner of the attic. How can a girl, even a tiny one, squeeze into such places? It strains reality that she moves through these places, so quiet that the family living in the house doesn’t notice her. But that doesn’t matter. Elise, the heroine, the brothers, the parents, the friend, Brody, and, last but not least, the monster, Traust, must all be seen through a metaphorical window. What the characters do in the story and the circumstances they confront, a hurricane and a flood, a monster breaking through the walls, as examples, occupy the outskirts of the real world, on the edge of fantasy, and yet present a true picture of what it takes to overcome adversity and live in the real world.

The writing in the novel is extraordinary, a style that carries a reader along, a fast pace where appropriate and a slow stroll at other times. Sentences omit verbs when a still life sort of image is intended. Including a verb in those places would be like walking fast past a painting, giving it a glance. The author’s style is brilliant, structuring sentences in the way he does to match a focus in a given section or the action in the plot. What happens in a termite swarm? The parents run up and down the stairs, closing windows, and turning off lights. But Eddie, calm and lying on his bed, ignores them, a quiet observation in his head: “Cracks beneath ill-cut doors and along the bottoms of the old storm windows, and holes in the foundation.” The sentence says everything you need to know about bugs in a porous house, and about uncertainty in life. There are many beautiful metaphors in this novel. To judge them grammatically as sentence fragments would be a mistake.

Girl In The Walls is a brilliant piece of art. All of its parts work together to tell a story of many dimensions. Its characters and its plot are never conventional. Appreciation of the novel is enhanced by a reader’s willingness to accept the unusual, to enjoy the passage of every hour in the story by the call of a bird sounded on a granddaughters clock, and to watch how a girl can wrap herself in a house “as if it were a winter coat.” One wants Elise never to take it off, but of course she must, and Edward, having run out in bare feet to his mailbox to get his memento, is lucky enough to see the hem of her dress as she goes around the corner. At that point one realizes that the story of Girl In The Walls goes on forever.

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