A Tale of Two Screams: The Screaming Child is a haunting account of one mother's obsession to find her missing child

 

The Screaming Child

By Scott Adlerberg

Ghoulish Books, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-943720-87-3

176 ppg.

Buylink

 

Brace yourself. You are about to be pulled into a mother’s grief. No, her son is not dead – at least, we think he is not dead. But he is missing, and the not knowing of where he is, if he is safe, if he is cared for or even if he is alive eats away at the mother in this book. This story is told from the mother’s point-of-view, so readers get a very raw and very emotional grasp of what she is going through.

 

In the beginning, we are introduced to the child who will eventually go missing. The story begins just as it does for many parents of missing children: One day, their child is there, then they are not. They are gone, almost erased from the world.

 

Coping with her child missing is just too much for the mother, Eleanor. She can’t handle it, as I’m sure many parents with missing children cannot. The pain, uncertainty and anger gets to be so bad between her and her husband that they often argue with each other. There’s the blame, the confusion and the regret.

 

So, she decides to spend some time somewhere else for a while. Somewhere she can be alone and just try to PROCESS everything.

 

Plus, being at home, a place she shared with her child, is too much for her. "On Grahame’s bed, at the kitchen table, in the closet with his sneakers and shoes—everywhere in the house, through every square foot—a void existed where my son had been. My husband could not fill that void." (Page 55)

 

Eleanor tries to throw herself into the writing of a nonfiction book she was working on before her child disappeared. Even then, though, she struggles with it, wondering if she is focusing her energy on the wrong thing. But then, while she is at her “shack,” something happens: She hears a scream. At first, she is not sure if she heard this sound right, but then she hears it again. And again. And she is convinced it is a child screaming. A thought enters her head: ‘That could be MY child who is screaming.’

 

This, I feel, is what ultimately keeps her rooted to the spot. She is extremely against leaving the shack and returning home to civilization. Perhaps she thinks she is close to wherever her child is being held captive. Maybe it’s a sign that he is alive and she must not give up hope. Whatever she feels about it, she refuses to leave her spot, instead staying and hoping to keep hearing that scream again.

 

This takes Eleanor through a world where she’s not sure which is which. On one hand, she hangs on to this mystery of the scream, wondering if it really is her child. And on the other hand, she tries to focus on the tangible things she can work with: Talking with people who knew her son, who know the area better or have more knowledge about the case. She tries to stay grounded even as the lingering mystery of that screaming child keeps trying to pull her back into a world of “what if’s” that she knows will cause her to lose the last grip of her sanity.

 

This is not just a story about a mother dealing with the pain of her child missing; in a way, it’s also a mystery to be solved. So, appropriately, this is a mystery horror novel. Eleanor gets all these different clues and all this misdirection happens, and while I was reading it, I was trying to think ahead. I was right there with her trying to solve that mystery and trying to find out where her son had been snatched away to.

 

One thing I noticed about this story that really stood out for me is the scream itself. Before Eleanor hears the scream of a child, she hears the anguished scream of a mother who has lost a child. This parallelism made me wonder how it seemed to symbolize the meaning of the story itself. The whole message behind the story. There is the mother who lost her child screaming and there is a child, possibly taken from a mother, screaming. It’s a thought I entertained until I got to the real horrors of this story, a horror which I was not prepared for.

 

The Screaming Child is a gripping story of loss and isolationism, as well as a raw look into the stories we try telling ourselves to alleviate the harsh realities of the world. For some, mysteries may never be solved, and we must cope with them in our own ways. Where to go from there are roads we all must eventually travel on our own.

 

 

Five stars

 

 

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.