Isis

Isis is a novella by the American writer Douglas Clegg, published in 2006 and illustrated throughout.

The book is a legend told in retrospect, since Iris becomes Isis and the story is about what she was willing to do to get her brother back, and Clegg's method is to let the reader hear the bargain being made long before its terms are clear. Belerion Hall supplies the machinery of the tale: the tombs, the stone circle, the gardener who knows the local rules and the grandfather whose religion is as severe as the governess's temper. The warning about oaths is the hinge of the plot, because the places on the cliff are described as listening for promises and turning them into flesh and blood, which is a fair description of how grief works as well. It is delivered as something the household has always known, in the tone of a man giving directions, which is what makes it easy for a lonely child to treat the ruins as somewhere to think. Clegg had written a long list of horror novels before this one, and the brevity of the novella suits the story, since everything the reader needs to know arrives in a single long remembrance.