Whisper Down the Lane

Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“Whisper down the lane” is an old-timey name for what we used to call “Telephone,” the game where a person whispers something to one person and then that person whispers to the next person and so on until the message is garbled and nothing like the original.

Set against the background of the “Satanic Panic” of the early 80’s (in which children were led into false confessions of imaginary evil-doing by teachers and authority figures, which led to quite a few wrongful imprisonments and false charges), Whisper Down the Lane flips between the past and the present. Back in the 80’s, A boy named Sean instigates a panic in his community in which a popular teacher is accused of being a Satanist.

In the present day, a man feels echoes of this event when a school’s pet rabbit is gutted and displayed in a ritualistic fashion. Later, the man’s stepson’s cat is also displayed in such a fashion.
Reality and paranoid fantasy crisscross as the man realizes that his pas may have finally caught up with him.

Whisper Down the Lane is entertaining all the way through, and for the most part, it holds up. It's not too Scooby Doo and other than that, I won't give anything away.




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