Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed

Scarlett Thomas likes islands: either literal sea-girt territories or closed enclaves where this wickedly inventive novelist practises her richly enjoyable experiments in plot and form. If her recent Oligarchy found its sour-sweet spot in a grisly girls’ boarding school, The Sleepwalkers creates another insular possession: the Greek island of ‘Kathos’, which almost resembles Samos. Here, within sight of the Turkish coast, the newlyweds Evelyn and Richard arrive as late-September storms brew to undergo their honeymoon from hell.

Ever since novels such as Bright Young Things (also island-set) and PopCo, Thomas has known how to fuse an acidly satirical streak of observation with storytelling artifice that keeps her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert. So it’s apt, but amusing, to find the publisher’s blurb comparing this pungent slice of ripe Mediterranean Gothic with HBO’s resort romp The White Lotus. The Sleepwalkers features a visiting movie producer who demands: ‘You gotta make it clearer what actually happened.’ But Thomas insistently and cleverly shows that a novel can do what a series screenplay can’t, or won’t.

What does happen? We eventually find out, but only via thorny, winding island paths. Evelyn is a writer-performer whose edgy one-woman show rocketed from fringe to screen until a Twitter pile-on snuffed out her career ‘like a campfire in a sudden downpour’. Richard, whose wealthy parents Evelyn once served as a housekeeper, makes a mint in hedgie-type finance. After a wedding ‘cursed’ by an incident we must wait to learn about, the couple share a sort of pre-honeymoon in the company of Richard’s sinister schoolmate and best man, Paul. Then they roll up at the elite hideaway Villa Rosa. There the seductive but creepy owner Isabella tells them about the sleepwalkers – a devoted older couple who drowned one night as the wife tried to save her wandering husband.