Clever Little Thing: A Novel

“A variation on The Miracle Worker, maybe, but still compelling.”

Everyone who reads thrillers is willing to suspend their disbelief to a certain degree. Readers don’t really believe that Maine game warden Mike Bowditch would get nearly murdered every time he goes into the New England woods, but that’s the price of admission for Paul Doiron’s excellent series.

Stephen King equips his supernatural tales with enough highly believable real-life people (often in Maine, too!) that the sudden veer into other realms becomes just one more way his fully realized characters are tested.

The Oxfordshire-based Helena Echlin is attempting some variation on the King formula in Clever Little Thing. Let’s get this out of the way quickly: It’s a novel about possession. By the dead. In this alternative reality, the recently deceased can come back and take over someone’s body.

Charlotte (who has a weightless advice columnist job at the Design Your Life lifestyle portal) has a brilliant but troubled daughter named Stella who is eight years old, but already reading weighty tomes about flying like Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation. She’s not very socialized and throws tantrums over just about every normal behavior (her freakouts are “like having a cattle prod applied directly to your brain stem,” Charlotte says). But Stella is kept barely above water by the family babysitter, Blanka, who is rather well-named—aside from taking stolid but devoted care of her young charge, she’s impressively opaque.

But then Blanka sends a mysterious email saying, “I cannot come anymore,” and almost immediately dies in a hot tub. And then, gradually, not overnight but over 100 or so pages, Stella starts to adopt Blanka’s placid personality. She suddenly has an Azerbaijani accent, eats meat, takes notes in Armenian, and cozies up to Blanka’s grieving mother, Irina. She starts to crochet and doesn’t read books.

The rest of the book is Charlotte in mama bear mode, fighting to get her daughter back. The oblivious husband, Pete, a cipher in the book, doesn’t notice anything is wrong, despite Stella saying things like, “I like the dark-dark.”

Here’s Mom in fighting mode. “Stella, my love,” Charlotte says. “Don’t look at Daddy, look at me. You don’t have to pretend to be someone else. I know you’re in there.”

But Stella just stares. “I saw clearly that she wasn’t pretending to be someone else for her father’s sake. She was someone else. But that wasn’t possible. I sank down onto her rug.” The writing reminds me of the moment in the Lindsay Lohan/Tyra Banks vehicle Life-Size (2000) when Barbie comes to life and the actor playing Lohan’s father says in a failed attempt to sound amazed, “That’s unbelievable.”

Frankly, it is unbelievable, and we’re not invested enough in the characters (Charlotte is well-meaning but annoying) to really care if Stella gets exorcised. A longer section fully rounding out the girl’s preoccupation personality would have helped. There’s a bit of a mystery about how Blanka died, but there’s not enough there there.

Stella’s head doesn’t rotate, and it isn’t the devil pulling the strings, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The possession isn’t all that dramatic. And a major hole in the story is the denouement—when Stella is “herself” again, everything is fine, though the kid was a total handful, defying school officials, therapists and her parents, in the early part of the book. Possession as therapy?

Clever Little Thing could have had an excellent premise in the on-the-ground story of a brilliant but wild child being brought into the real world by a devoted caregiver. A variation on The Miracle Worker, maybe, but still compelling.