Penguin Random House has published Chloe Wilson’s highly anticipated debut novel, The Thornbacks, a witty and beautifully crafted response to the peculiar ways bodies accrue social and cultural value. The story follows two unrelated “sisters,” brought together by their parents’ marriage, in a narrative that is playful, astute, and compelling. However, while the sentences sting and delight, the plot is stretched a little too thin.
A Masterful Storyteller
Wilson’s searing collection of short stories, Hold Your Fire, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing in 2022. She has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and won the Iowa Review Fiction Prize. Her prose is poignant and haunting, filled with unnerving humour and unsettling observations. In “Tongue-Tied,” she writes: “I knew it was her before she turned around. 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.”
Yet 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 novella.
The Premise
Gertie and Tabitha are the same age and grew up together in a dysfunctional blended family. Details about their older half/stepbrother Noah and their dead father Neil remain unclear. Now adults, they work side by side as morticians, punctuating their uneventful lives with visits to their ungrateful stepmother (infatuated with Noah), occasional shopping trips, and sinister online dating. By social convention, the women are considered unattractive, so they use a digital profile assembled from photos of Poppy, a pretty young dead woman they prepared for burial over a year ago. Poppy, an angelic blonde, died from a brain aneurysm, leading to her boyfriend Brad being charged with murder. Despite his acquittal, Gertie and Tabitha remain convinced of his guilt and track him with internet alerts. They use Poppy’s fake identity to lure toxic male targets from a Tinder-style app to bars, where they execute rehearsed operations to avenge Poppy’s death.
Being Unlovable as a Defence
As the novel unfolds, the women’s personal reasons for their routine are revealed. Mirroring each other in disturbing and tender ways, they retreat from a world that has hurt them. Like marine thornbacks, they develop a tough, repellent exterior to conceal themselves. Their reaction to being unloved has been to render themselves unlovable to everyone except each other, embracing the old-fashioned term “thornback” for unmarried women. Wilson’s psychological portrayal is beautifully composed through an enmeshed, hypervigilant narrative voice that emphasises their merged personalities. Lonely and relegated to the margins, their conjoined psyches find expression through words that run into each other, exposing their stunted development. “We had our robes on, our fluffy robes,” they chime, watching their Saturday night skincare program. “Mine was pink. And mine was ruby red. Red is your colour, after all. We had them monogrammed.”
This plural perspective is deliberately confusing, revealing the women purely through their defence strategy rather than as vulnerable individuals. Wilson’s language ensures witty, elegantly macabre delivery, but keeping readers engaged from such a distance for a novel’s duration is tough. The voice is compelling enough, but repetitive plot elements—the bar games and grimly detailed mortuary cases—feel like well-written dead ends. At times, style supersedes complexity, making the novel sag. This would matter less in a short story.
Repressed Rage and Ugly Feelings
Despite weak spots, The Thornbacks is a smart, sharp, and thoroughly enjoyable debut with memorable characters and an original feminist revenge tale, refreshingly free of “psycho bitch” clichés. Like the wallflowers in Harriet Lane’s novels, Gertrude and Tabitha quiver with repressed rage and what Sianne Ngai calls ugly feelings, but they flout legal and ethical boundaries quietly, on their own terms, without resorting to violence. They resemble the “weird sisters” trope from Cinderella, Macbeth, The Shining, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Daisy Johnson’s Sisters, rather than the crazed killers in novels like Gone Girl and Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand. Timid since childhood and diminished by co-dependency, they lack vigilante power and are not psychopathic. As stealthy predators, they seek to alter victims by tampering in ways that shock and disorientate without inflicting bodily harm.
Avoiding a neat resolution, the novel concludes with a loose gathering of key strands, leaving questions about personal identity, psychological vulnerability, and judgment lingering. The final quandary remains: was it worth the cost?
