Ariel (novel)

I am Ariel, the Adopted.

Ariel Jardell is thirteen years old and a bit too perceptive for her own good. Now that her mom Roberta has had a child of her own, she's ready to dispose of Ariel, and Ariel knows it. Her father David is well aware the little boy, Caleb, is not his and that Roberta has been seeing an old boyfriend, lawyer Jeff Channing. One night, Roberta has a strange dream, and wakes to find that Caleb has suddenly died. And Ariel takes one look at her and says Is Caleb dead?....

Written by hardboiled detective author Lawrence Block and marketed as a horror novel, this is a very subtle story about the scapegoating of a "different" child, communication failure and the destruction of a family, with supernatural elements crawling in at the windows.


 * Bookworm: Ariel. She's got all the Oz books, plus young-adult novels, and cites several books she loved but didn't finish, including Rosalyn Drexler's I Am The Beautiful Stranger. She's also read at least some of Moby Dick and actually did finish Poe's The Purloined Letter, which is where she gets the idea to keep her diary in a school notebook. (She talks about knowing better than to keep it in one of those My Secret Thoughts books around Roberta.) Sylvia Plath and her book Ariel are mentioned several times.
 * Creepy Child: Roberta thinks Ariel is. Also, Ariel's klutzy friend Erskine Wold.
 * Diary: Ariel keeps hers in an ordinary spiral notebook.
 * Dead Baby Comedy: Erskine is fond of this.
 * Dreaming the Truth: Ariel may have done so, but she may also be dreaming what she fears.
 * Driven to Suicide:.
 * Haunted House: Itself a character in the story. Ariel's family has just moved into the big old house in an older section of Charleston, South Carolina. While Ariel loves it, Roberta comes to believe it is conscious and evil.
 * Hell Is That Noise: Ariel's flute, to Roberta -- but especially at the climax.
 * Hey, You: Roberta rarely uses Ariel's name. She speaks of "the child".
 * Interplay of Sex and Violence: Jeff and his, er, gun.
 * Jail Bait: Ariel, to Jeff as he goes off his rocker.
 * Magical Flutist: A spooky version thereof. It's never described just where Ariel got her tin flute. She plays it all the time. David enjoys it as did little Caleb, but Roberta hears it as Hell Is That Noise. Or maybe Ariel is just a Dreadful Musician -- but at the end it's
 * Mind Control Eyes: Ariel learns to make people who fear her obey her by "making her eyes look like those of the lady in the portrait" she's found.
 * Out-of-Clothes Experience: Ariel lights candles and contemplates the lady in the portrait. She begins to do it without being aware she's doing it, and when she comes out of it she's naked and being yelled at by Roberta.
 * Puppy Love: Ariel and Erskine, although they agree they don't want to "do that" because they're friends.
 * Sanity Slippage: First Roberta, then Jeff, both becoming obsessed with Ariel.
 * Sleepwalking: Everyone in Ariel's family does this at some point, either because they're tired, drunk, or.... something else.
 * Spooky Painting: Found in Ariel's attic and "adopted" by her. May or may not be a portrait of Grace Molineaux, who may or may not have been an Ax Crazy murderess and/or Ariel's former reincarnation.
 * The Alcoholic: David becomes a functional one of these. But he also loves Ariel, so things may work out for him. Roberta is hooked on prescription sleeping pills.
 * The Beautiful Elite: Jeff Channing comes very close to being one of these. Ariel and Erskine say "he's got those television good looks."