Changeling – Matt Wesolowski

I scribbled down the title of Changeling years ago, and searched for it for aaages before finally securing a copy. It’s been so long that I actually can’t remember who originally recommended it, or why. I’d forgotten everything about it, to the extent that I didn’t actually realise it was the third book in a series, until I picked it up to read for this review.

Luckily, even though Changeling is mid-way through the Six Stories series, it can be read as a standalone. There’s just a couple of allusions to previous ‘cases’ investigated by the podcaster protagonist, but other than that you wouldn’t know that you were coming in half-way.

So, as you can probably guess, the story is framed as a podcast. Scott King hosts ‘Six Stories’, where he re-examines historical crimes through the perspectives of six key witnesses. He receives a letter from a listener asking him to look at the case of seven-year-old Alfie Marsden, who vanished from the backseat of his father’s car in the Wentshire Forest, never to be seen again. That was back in 1988, and Alfie has been presumed dead since 1995. Scott is resistant to the idea, at first (what good could it possibly do?), but finds himself drawn into the mystery.

This isn’t just a missing person story, or a cold case – there’s a spooky element to Changeling rooted in the setting. Wentshire Forest is infamous for strange, inexplicable phenomena: knocking sounds, whispers in the woods, angry trees, fiendish spirits, and so on. The mostly-unspoken implication the whole way through is that Alfie could have been taken by the forests’ inhabitants, and they sabotaged any efforts to find him.

The first half of Changeling is definitely spooky – at times, downright scary. It was silly of me to read it in the middle of the night, alone at home, with the tree out the front dropping leaves and detritus onto my roof making a ‘knocking’ sound every few minutes. I ended up having to finish Changeling all in one sitting before I could confidently go to bed, otherwise I would’ve been fretting over it and jumping up at every noise until dawn.

The chronology is a bit hard to track at first: who Scott is speaking to, and when, and the stories they’re relating all get a bit blurred. It does come together, though, once the story starts to unravel and the characters start revealing stuff. The ‘shock twists’ towards the end didn’t quite land, mostly because they were bleeding obvious from a mile off, and a couple of mysteries were left unresolved. That all should’ve bugged me, but on the whole, I felt satisfied by the way Wesolowski wrapped Changeling up.

What I liked most of all was the way that Wesolowski steered away from the ‘perfect victims’ so often depicted in this kind of novel. No one in Changeling lights up a room. The child’s mother has severe substance abuse issues, Alfie himself is a “troubled” and “challenging” child, and his father… well, that’s a whole other kettle of fish. (Trigger warnings: domestic abuse, coercive control, substance abuse.)

And, of course, the setting – that’s the big draw of Changeling, and what sets it apart. The eerie forest, the sinister shadows, the lingering sense of the Other hiding between the trees – it’s all played out to perfection. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that the role of the fairy folk alluded to throughout becomes a kind of metaphor for human relationships and the ways we help and hurt each other. Wesolowski is very clever in the way he used that to both enrich the story and scare the pants of the reader.

I’m serious, Keeper Upperers: don’t read this one in the middle of the night if you’re a chicken.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Changeling:

• “This book was as compulsive as a whole bag of Maltesers.” – Paddy Kelly