Twice Lost

Reviews / Votes

"Beautifully executed, deeply unsettling, [Twice Lost] is enigmatic and ambiguous in the way of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock . . . Its first chapter immediately creates, then intensifies, an unnerving atmosphere of mystery and menace . . . Astonishing."

-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post



"Haunting, fascinating, wonderful."
-The San Francisco Chronicle



"A quiet, subtle spellbinder is a skillful piece of highwire work . . . Unnatural events, or are they supernatural, are balanced by a shrewd sense of character, motivation and manipulation, and provide a superior, teasing and very different kind of suspense story."
-Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review



"Alternating the knotty revelations of a whodunnit with subjective dives into the uncanny spell of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and vivid depictions of the pastoral English countryside, Paul's narrative leads readers down the garden path only to send them backtracking through a hedge maze of competing interpretations, under the gradually darkening sky of a fallen Eden . . . Paul [is] a writer worthy of comparison with such diverse sensibilities as Patricia Highsmith's mordant psychological suspense and Charles Williams's Manichean metaphysical fantasy. An odd duck with iridescent plumage."
-David Wright, Library Journal



"Phyllis Paul is a writer of hints and half-lights. Her suburban scene is shadowy with empty roads and tall trees in the dusk. Twice Lost is not an easy book to read but neither is it an easy book to forget."
-Times Literary Supplement



"[Paul writes with] an almost medieval sense of good and ill. One enters a different world-compelling, fearful, mysterious. The characters live, the place has frightening reality . . . a kind of violent beauty."
-Elizabeth Jane Howard



"Paul manages to weave a frightening web of suspicion and terror. And as the web tightens, the demarcation between reality and nightmare blurs."
-Springfield Republican



"Phyllis Paul was that rare creature, a puritan with a passionate and colorful imagination . . . [Her] quintessential novel, and arguably her finest, is Twice Lost (1961). Here she is writing at the height of her powers, combining even more successfully than elsewhere a mystery story with a metaphysical fable . . . Twice Lost is an unforgettable portrayal of the human capacity for self-deception, and of the vulnerability of the innocent to the inroads of scrupulosity. It is a novel of a uniquely unsettling kind, the definitive achievement of the possessor of such a fascinating . . . and disturbing gift."
-Glen Cavaliero, Wormwood



"Paul's great subject, on the page and off, was darkness-darkness both mundane and metaphysical. To survive, her characters cling to the dark, as much to hide their sins as to keep the truth at a safe distance."
-Jeremy M. Davies, from the Foreword