Twice Lost

by Phyllis Paul

Novel of suspense in Gothic tradition.

"Subtly told, it concerns the disappearance of a little girl and the effect that the event has on the English village of Hilberry... Mis Paul manages to weave a frightening web of suspicion and terror. And as the web tightens, the demarcation between reality and night mare blurs... The story drives ahead, leaving the reader quite helpless to resist its fearful denouement..."
- Springfield Republican

Genres: Fiction, Gothic, Horror, Classics, Mystery, Literary Fiction, Adult

Paperback

First published October 30, 1971

About the author

Very little is known about Phyllis Paul and she is little-known today, although she received very positive reviews for her work at the time of publictaion. A subtle novelist, her work invokes an atmosphere of the supernatural and often allows for a supernatural interpretation.
Excerpt from tartaruspress.com

Here are her 11 known works:

1.We Are Spoiled, 1933
2, The Children Triumphant, 1934
3. Camilla, 1949
4. Constancy, 1951
5. The Lion of Cooling Bay, 1953
6. Rox Hall Illuminated, 1956
7. A Cage for the Nightingale, 1957
8. Twice Lost, 1960
9. A Little Treachery, 1962
10. Pulled Down, 1964 (Also published as Echo of Guilt, 1966)
11. An Invisible Darkness, 1967

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A vintage novel that’s something of a page turner mainly because it’s so incredibly odd, a tale of bizarre relationships and twisted motives rooted in the disappearance of a seven-year-old girl Vivian Lambert who may have been abused and neglected or simply a manipulative liar. Vivian lived with her father and stepmother in Hilbury Village a deeply respectable suburb on the outskirts of the countryside, its manicured lawns an attempt to stave off the possibility of an encroaching wilderness. Last seen by teenager Christine Gray, Vivian’s true fate’s a mystery, one that will haunt Christine for years to come. Intertwined with this mysterious loss are the sinister Antequins a literary father and son who come to live in the sprawling, dilapidated Carlotta House where Vivian may have died. Paul, whose obscurity has turned her into a cult author, flouts convention here, she happily plays havoc with timelines, veers off in totally unexpected directions and mixes elegant description with passages of marvellously overwrought prose. She offers no closure, instead her peculiar blend of gothic yarn and morality tale flirts with all manner of explanation for Vivian’s whereabouts from the perverse to the ghostly and even the mundane. A narrative journey that turns on issues of knowledge, trust and vested interests. Weird but compelling.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher McNally Editions for an ARC

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

Twice lost and never to be found again, the poor little dear aggravating little twerp. I love how Phyllis Paul is clearly unafraid to paint a portrait of a child who is both tragic and utterly annoying.

This is deeply buried treasure but well worth the dig if you like ambiguous, slowly simmering mysteries that never actually come to a boil. No heat and much that chills. Twice Lost has potential madness and definite gaslighting, dreamy yet decidedly unromantic prose, and two astonishing leap forwards in time that take place across two short pages and that upend everything that came before - it felt like the author reached from the book to throw a glass of cold water on my face, and then quickly followed that up with a sharp slap. How rude - but how exciting!

synopsis: the child is gone, the girl who lost her is broken, the parents are uncaring, the insular village... moves on.

An eccentric author and his avaricious, talentless son play key roles in the mystery. Unfortunately the latter is such a mustache-twirling villain that he became rather unbearable, so farewell 4th star. The solution to the puzzle and what became of the child... quite cruel. Cold-blooded Phyllis Paul!

Favorite bit: a villainous mother and son take a stroll through a city, carefully listening and making pungent but no doubt droll comments regarding all who cross their path. Reminded me of similar strolls taken by me and my own dear mother. Nothing is quite so bonding!

[Athanase Pernatte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was eager to finally discover the oeuvre of Phyllis Paul after reading good things about her from Glen Cavaliero in Wormwood magazine and R.B. Russell in his Fifty Lost books, and I was far from disappointed. First of all, one must point out the impeccable style of Phyllis Paul. She writes beautifully and evocatively with the savoir faire of a jeweller. If the plot matters to you as well, you won't be disappointed for the intrigue will keep you guessing with baited breath all the way. One thing I have read nowhere else yet about Paul and which was soon striking to me is her resemblance with Shirley Jackson. Of course, Paul's stories are not set in America, but they share a common knack for describing the everyday petty evils of common people whilst unravelling mysterious narratives. Mingling the acumen of Agatha Christie and a nostalgic stance of Alain Fournier Paul achieved a masterpiece navigating across several styles.

[Ariadne Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first few pages are among the most excitingly oppressive (and that’s not a contradiction in terms here) I’ve ever read, creating an almost impossibly vivid, palpable sense of foreboding and apprehension while set on a pretty summer’s day among a merry company enjoying a tennis party. Unfortunately things become much less focused after that, with the passage of time and other narrative techniques causing some problems.

More: https://twicelostblog.wordpress.com/2...

[Bronwyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come once I’ve thought about it more. Rounding up to four stars at the moment, though we’ll see. Hmm.

Alright. This was fine. I’ll keep it at four stars because I would recommend it. I feel like this book just suffers because I’m reading it sixty years after it was published. Some old books suffer because newer books or movies have done the same/similar premise and so feel… less inventive as a result. This isn’t a bad book at all. Some of the writing is gorgeous. It just fell a bit flat because I felt a bit like I knew it already.

[Charles Edwards-Freshwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, haunting tale that is both powerful and yet somehow lacking.

Although my life is busy at the moment, this slim, 250 page book took me almost two weeks to read, which is insane considering I can usually zip through a book this length in a day or two.

The language is dense, the timescales are confusing, and the overly purple prose suffocates in huge paragraphs, creating anoppressive, difficult to read text. However, this does add to the atmosphere of the story in some ways, especially in those early chapters where we know Vivian is missing and we don't know what happens.

Some people have compared this to one of my favourite books ever - Picnic at Hanging Rock - and I do see why this comparison exists. There's a a palpable dreaminess to this text, as well as a lack of any solid resolution that I think will drive many people reading it away from enjoying it completely.

A strange, sad tale that I know will stick with me, but I can't award it five stars because it was incredibly hard work to read, especially when life is so busy. I'd perhaps recommend anyone reading this one to do so at a time where they are able to spend much more dedicated time with it than I was able to. I'll definitely reread it in the future, though.

[J.R.]

oop

[Bethany Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first miss for me from McNally Editions.

[Sophia · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strange one to be sure, but not as strange as the jacket copy (or the Harper’s review) promised. The beginning of Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul was right up my alley: starting in medias res in a field in a semi-rural English town. It’s summer. A young girl who is mostly ostracized by the community has lost something in the field and an older girl volunteers to help find whatever it is that she has lost (the little girl can’t quite the right details). They don’t find it, and the older girl accompanies the weird little girl home, but doesn’t watch her go in the house. The next day, the little girl is missing. This kicks off the supposed intrigue of the story, but the entire vibe shifts. It’s no longer mysterious in a surreal way but rather mysterious in a murder mystery kind of way (save for one bizarre scene where a supposed reporter sneaks into a house under false pretenses and then talks to a kid who is just randomly sitting in the attic). Mostly Twice Lost is about the older girl, Christine, and how she lives with the guilt of not having safely delivered the little girl Vivian when she walked her home. There’s a connected side plot about an author named Thomas Antequin and his obnoxious, status-seeking son Keith, but they are both unlikeable and boring, reading most of the novel was rather tedious. The ending was a let down also, which wouldn’t have been so bad if the book had preserved its initial air of surrealism.

[J]

Despite the Gothic romance covers of the old paperback editions, I didn't find this to be a light, breezy read. Paul's style is so dense that I sometimes had to read sentences more than once to figure out what exactly she was trying to say. Which isn't to say she writes badly -- she doesn't; she's able to paint a picture with words and bring a scene to life -- it's just that it felt overwritten for this type of book. The novel had an interesting premise, but there were catastrophic problems of pacing and organization. Important characters and plotlines would basically disappear from one page to another. At one point the book just flashes forward ten years out of the blue. The last half or 2/3 of the book I found myself starting to skim a bit. This is probably a case of a book's reputation being boosted by the fact that it was almost impossible to get a copy of it.

(The bit about the young woman showing up and claiming to be the missing girl from years earlier, and the whole question of whether or not she is telling the truth reminded me of the Tichborne case, fictionalized in Robin Maugham's novel The Link (1969), where the idea is handled more skillfully and more suspensefully.)

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

oooooh, so thankful to this McNally Editions series for introducing me to this wonderfully weird gothic tale and the lovely writing of Phyllis Paul. the subtlety sinister mysteries become murkier with every page - the overall vibe is decidedly unsettling, and there’s no grand closure (which i love).

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an odd little mystery. The elaborate writing and abrupt shifts in timelines were jarring and unusual. I found the beginning of the novel much more compelling than the latter half, but I'm glad I picked it up.

[Deborah Mesplay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange little book, written in 1960 by a relatively unknown writer. It is a slow burn, atmospheric with a sense of foreboding.

[a-p · Rating 4 out of 5]

tragically underrated!!

[Sneezle McGee]

DNF for now. I’m finding it difficult to get immersed in the writing style. The author has made some choices that are probably purposeful artistic choices, but I can’t help but I wish an editor had smoothed them out.

Examples:

- The first few chapters are narrated from the third person limited perspective of teenage Christine, followed by some third person chapters about an elderly novelist and his son. Chapter 8 then switches back to Christine, but it doesn’t use her name at all until several paragraphs into the chapter only referring to “she” before then. This was was a really confusing perspective shift since it’s unclear if we’re back with Christine or if a new second female pov character has been introduced. From what I can tell there are no other female pov characters in the book and Christine is doing mundane tasks in the chapter so it seems less like intentional suspense building and more like bad editing.

- The next chapter is a scene after Vivian goes missing where Christine is talking to her mother about the missing child, but also thinking about things various people have said about the missing child and quotation marks are used liberally to the point that almost every sentence in the chapter is in quotation. It was unclear to me most of the time whether actual dialogue was being spoken or whether Christine was just thinking about overheard dialogue because both the conversation with her mother and her thoughts are about the same topic and for the most part use identical punctuation. This could be a cool artistic choice in a book I otherwise liked, but I don’t care for this book so it pissed me off.

- We then later get a chapter where the elderly novelist meets Christine and her family and decides he wants to marry her to get his annoying son off his back, but he has to wait several months until her father dies so he can convince her mother to give him her blessing, and then they get married but the honeymoon phase wears off when neither of them are able to run the house so his annoying son (who also got married off page) has to move back in to run things, and this entire sequence takes place over a page and a half. I have no idea how much time was supposed to have elapsed in that page and a half but found it very jarring compared to how slow paced the book was up to that point.

Various other writing choices like that aggrieved me over the portion that I read, and I simply do not enjoy the reading experience enough to continue.

[JimZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you McNally Editions for re-issuing this long-lost novel! Overall I would give it 3.5 stars. At times it was 4-star material, but it went on too long at times. I would say that was the only negative in an otherwise very good book that made me nervous at times. I wondered what happened to little Vivian Lambert.

Here is a description of the author on the back inner cover of the book:
• Phyllis Paul published eleven novels between 1933 and 1967, but otherwise left almost no trace of herself. She was unmarried, lived quietly, and was intensely private. She died in 1970, at the age of 70, after being hit by a motorcycle. If not for a label on her pocket handkerchief, her body would have remained unidentified.

Synopsis of book from inner front cover of the book:
• In a rustic, idyllic Englsi9h village, on a summer’s day, in the midst of a carefree tennis party, a fragile, needy child, left too much on her own, vanishes from her family’s front garden.
Years pass and the mystery persists: an enduring torment for the teenage Christine Gray, the last person to see Vivian alive. Perhaps if she’d shown the girl a little kindness, and seen her safely home, Vician might still be with them? Yet when someone claiming to be a gown-up Vivian returns to the land of the living, the enigma only deepens, threatening to consume the wicked and innocent alike.
Equal parts, The Turn of the Screw, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and gothic thriller, Twice Lost was admired by such authors as Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and John Cowper Powys—none of whom succeeded in wooing Phyllis Paul into London literary life. Virtually lost to time even before her death, her novels have been out of print for more than 50 years, and fetch fantastic prices in the rare book trade. (I could only find single copies of three of her other books, and they were in the hundreds of dollars.)

Wikipedia’s biography of her (wonderful stuff you can read about the author from the reference section in the bio including Glen Cavaliero’s article in a journal, The Novels of Phyllis Paul!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis...

Reviews:
• https://www.stuckinabook.com/twice-lo...
• https://furrowedmiddlebrow.blogspot.c...
• https://readersretreat2017.wordpress....

[Pascale · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very atmospheric tale with an inconclusive ending. Vivian Lambert, a not altogether appealing girl of 7, disappears from her quiet, heavily suburbanized village after being dropped off just in front of her house by Christine Gray, a sensitive young librarian. Beset by guilty feelings, Christine makes a hasty marriage to a much older novelist, Thomas Antequin, who happens to be the new owner of the estate where Vivian played on the last afternoon she was seen. The marriage soon unravels, not only because of the huge difference in age between Antequin and his bride, but mostly because Thomas's son Keith, who is a second-rate scribbler himself, lives off his father and doesn't want to share him. After Thomas's death, Christine meets a young woman who presents herself as Vivian and says she was abducted and whisked off to South America by a lady who did happen to leave Hilbery the day Vivian went missing. There is plausibility to the girl's tale, but it is also possible that she is an impostor who's wise to the fact that Mr. Lambert's collection of curios fetched a good price after his death. As Christine is the only one who is approached by "Vivian", Keith tries to gaslight his hated step-mother and have her sectioned. Eventually the girl who claimed to be Vivian commits suicide, unbeknownst to Christine. Keith meets a bizarre and gruesome death after being attacked and bitten in a dark stairwell. This summary omits many secondary characters, some of whom seemed totally redundant to me, like a little boy adopted by Thomas and brought up by Keith. The book has wonderfully evocative passages, but the author seems to lose her grip on the plot midway through her tale.

[Eggfir Traptoe]

The following is not a review but verbatim blurb from the dust jacket of the 1960 Heinemann first edition of 'Twice Lost' by Phyllis Paul:

"PHYLLIS PAUL'S novels take one straight into a country of mystery and half-lights: a country where the thing seen and the thing imagined are hard to tell apart, where good and evil, sweet- and rank-smelling plants, struggle fiercely against each other for air. Here is the same crepuscular territory that Henry James explored in The Turn of the Screw. Never has Miss Paul led her readers through such fascinating, overgrown paths as in her new book Twice Lost.
The germ of the mystery (from which more mystery grows fast) is the unexplained disappearance of a small girl in the village of Hilbery. Alarm, suspicion and guilt proliferate, but can find no foothold, so complete is the puzzle. In the mind of her step-mother who had neglected her, of Christine Gray who had escorted her home on the fatal evening, of Thomas Antequin, the ageing novelist and his 'devoted' son Keith, the figure of young Vivian Lambert assumes desperately troubling proportions. When the lost girl appears to have returned and is then lost again, the plot thickens and the line between reality and imagination grows frighteningly thin until the sudden final resolution.
This is Miss Paul's finest book to date. There are few other writers today who can combine psychological depth with straightforward suspense, who can at once chill the spine and perturb the soul."

Wrapper design by Sheila Perry

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

All but forgotten since its initial publication in 1960, Paul’s curious novel seems almost perversely designed to confound expectations. The mysterious and haunting disappearance of seven-year-old Vivian Lambert is rendered still more baffling by her possible reappearance several years later, opening old wounds and inflicting new ones. Especially poignant is the moral struggle and apparent gaslighting of Christine, perhaps the last to see the girl alive and the first to witness her seeming resurrection. Alternating the knotty revelations of a whodunnit with subjective dives into the uncanny spell of James’ Turn of the Screw and vivid depictions of the pastoral English countryside, Paul’s narrative leads us down the garden path only send us backtracking through a hedge maze of competing interpretations, under the gradually darkening sky of a fallen Eden. Readers undaunted by deep perplexities will find in Paul a writer worthy of comparison with such diverse sensibilities as the mordant psychological suspense of Patricia Highsmith and the Manichean metaphysical fantasy of Charles Williams. An odd duck with iridescent plumage.

[pennyg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange story with a very distinctive writing style , slightly reminiscent of Hitchcock or old episodes of the twilight zone. A bit too long to be suspenseful and just left with calling it odd.

A description in the book, I think is telling " A certain critic had been inclined to smile and dismissed Thomas as a curious throwback---had spoken of an archaic style which fell fatally between prose and poetry. Here was one, he had said, who wrote with an artifice, who employed a strong, unabashedly ornamental language and wildness of plot reminiscent of an Elizabethan drama. Here was one born out of his time"

An apt description.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fitfully fun and eerie, like a rural English Picnic At Hanging Rock, but they should call this Twice Long not Twice Lost because it is Twice as Long as it should be. There is simply not enough meat on these bones to sustain 250 pages!! Lots of passages where the action gets interrupted by like four pages of internal monologue that seems to just repeat the same info in different wording over and over again, or three or four paragraphs about the shape of icicles outside a house. A little bit of a Halloween Read letdown but I’m moving onto bigger and better and freakier books before October is up.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

But as she had never wanted the truth, but only comfort, so she had not now found it.

An incredibly odd and compelling tale take takes so many twists and turns, and a cast of horrible people. The comparison to The Turn of the Screw is very apt.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an odd, unsettling little book. I’m not sure I can fully recommend it, as it does drag a bit and took me forever to read, but I don’t regret reading it at all. Would recommend if you enjoy forgotten vintage middlebrow gothics.

[Bonisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

difficult to follow at times but the ending is worth it

[Francheska · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 🌸

[Selin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really over-written and kind of a drag. But fun and spooky in places! The most interesting thing about this book though is the author’s life story (or lack thereof)

[Natalie Landau · Rating 3 out of 5]

my least fave mcnally editions yet but it definitely had some moments. I got quite in to it about 80% there but wasn’t worth it in the end