Penguin Random HouseChloe Wilson’s hotly anticipated debut novel, The Thornbacks, is a beautifully wrought response to the peculiar, often cruel ways bodies accrue social and cultural value. This story of two unrelated “sisters”, brought together by the marriage of their parents, is playful, witty, astute and compelling – but while the sentences sting and delight in equal measure, the plot is stretched a little too thin.Wilson’s searing collection of extraordinary tales, Hold Your Fire, was a rightful winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing in 2022. She has a string of other well deserved accolades to her name, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlist, and the Iowa Review Fiction Prize. Clearly a masterful storyteller, Wilson is capable of poignant, haunting prose that quivers with unnerving humour and unsettling observations. “I knew it was her before she turned around,” she writes in Tongue-Tied, from her volume of short stories. “Gym teachers, unlike other teachers, don’t know their students seated and face-forward. We know their proportions, their ratio of muscle to fat, the smell of their feet, of their unwashed groins and underarms. We know their limits.”But her first book-length work, while expertly conceived, suffers from a slight lack of narrative backbone. It would arguably have fared better as a long short story, or even a novella. Review: The Thornbacks – Chloe Wilson (Hamish Hamilton)The premise is promising. Gertie and Tabitha are the same age and have grown up together within a dysfunctional blended family. Some of the details are unclear, particularly concerning their older half/stepbrother Noah, and Neil, the only father named in the story, is dead. Now adults, they work side by side as morticians, punctuating their mostly uneventful life with visits to their ungrateful and slovenly step/mother (who is weirdly infatuated with Noah), the occasional shopping trip and some decidedly sinister online dating behaviour. By the strict standards of social convention, the two women realise they are considered unattractive, so to indulge in their spurious dating activity, they’ve assembled a digital profile from the photographs of Poppy, a pretty young dead woman whose corpse they prepared for burial over a year ago. An angelic blonde, Poppy died from a brain aneurysm which led to her boyfriend Brad being charged with her murder. Despite his acquittal, Gertie and Tabitha remain convinced of his guilt and are still tracking him with internet alerts. They are also using Poppy’s fake identity to lure carefully chosen, seemingly toxic male targets from a Tinder-style app to bars around the city, where they execute their perfectly rehearsed operations in what appears to be a skewed and indirect attempt to avenge Poppy’s death. Being unlovable as a defenceAs the book unfolds, Gertie and Tabitha’s personal reasons for their disquieting routine are revealed. Mirroring each other in ways that are both disturbing and tender, the women are in retreat from a world that has hurt them, and like the marine thornbacks of the novel’s title, have learned to survive by developing a tough, repellent, supposedly protective exterior that serves to conceal them. Ultimately, their reaction to being unloved has been to render themselves unlovable to almost everyone except each other, as if they have purposely decided to embrace and embody the old-fashioned use of “thornback”, as a term for unmarried women. Wilson’s psychological portrayal of her damaged protagonists is beautifully composed through an enmeshed, hypervigilant narrative voice which emphasises the extent of the womens’ merged personalities. Lonely, eccentric and relegated to the margins of society, their conjoined psyches find expression through words that literally run into each other, exposing their mutually stunted individual development. “We had our robes on, our fluffy robes,” chime the pair, settling down to watch their regular Saturday night skincare program, starring the girlfriend of Gertrude’s ex. “Mine was pink. And mine was ruby red. Red is your colour, after all. We had them monogrammed.”As a narrative device, this plural perspective is deliberately confusing. It also means the women are revealed purely through their watertight defence strategy, rather than as vulnerable individuals. Wilson’s mastery of language ensures a witty and elegantly macabre delivery, but the challenge of keeping the reader engaged from such a distance – for the duration of a novel – is a tough one.On balance, I’d say the voice is compelling enough to achieve this. But the repetitive plot elements don’t help, with the women’s bar games and grimly detailed mortuary cases occasionally feeling like incredibly well written dead ends. At times, style supersedes complexity in ways that make the novel sag. This wouldn’t matter nearly as much in a short story, where the scope and scale would make it work.Repressed rage and ugly feelingsOverall, despite weak spots, this is a smart, sharp and thoroughly enjoyable debut, featuring memorable characters and an original interpretation of the well-trodden feminist revenge tale, refreshingly free of tired old “psycho bitch” clichés. Like the seething wallflowers of Harriet Lane’s novels, Alys Always and Other People’s Fun, Gertrude and Tabitha quiver with repressed rage and what Sianne Ngai calls ugly feelings – but choose to flout legal and ethical boundaries in quiet ways, and on their own terms, instead of resorting to violence.They resemble the “weird sisters” trope of Cinderella, Macbeth, The Shining, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Daisy Johnson’s Sisters, rather than the crazed killers of novels like Gone Girl and Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand. Timid since childhood, further diminished by the comfort of their co-dependency, the women do not possess the psychological power of vigilantes. Nor are they psychopathic and homicidal. By contrast, as stealthy, low-lying predators, they seek to alter their victims by tampering with them in ways that shock and disorientate, but without inflicting bodily harm.Avoiding a neat resolution, the novel concludes with a loose gathering together of several key strands. Like all good stories, it leaves the reader with a handful of questions. Issues of personal identity, psychological vulnerability and the powers of judgement and perception are all left to linger, along with a final quandary that can never be answered: was it worth the cost?Liz Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.