The Ice Twins is a psychological horror story about a family suffering the loss of one of their identical twins.  Sarah and Angus have endured the death of one of their 6 year old daughters, and they decide for reasons that don’t make much sense to move from busy London to an isolated small island in Scotland, in a small town.  They ignore the fact that the winters there are terrible and they will have hardly any social support.  The story is told by two main narrators: one is Sarah, and the other is a neutral voice using the third person but taking Angus’s perspective. As the story unfolds, we realize that someone is not telling the whole truth, and there is a mystery to solve. Why does Kirstie start denying that she is Kirstie, and why does she say that she is in fact Lydia?  And how did their daughter die? It becomes clear that there is a link between the death and the problems in their marriage, but it isn’t clear who is to blame. As their marriage deteriorates, Angus and Sarah each formulate their own theories. The question becomes who is deluded and who really knows what is going on.

The unabridged audiobook is 12 hours long, so this is a lengthy novel and much of it is excruciating.  It relies on cliché after cliché, from drunken Scots to creaking old houses. Most problematic is the character of Sarah, who, as so often happens in these novels and the movies made of them, is crazy, weak, and angry. She makes so many bad choices that it often seems that she is incapable of doing anything smart. Whenever her daughter says anything challenging to her, Sarah replies “Sorry?” or “What?” Not only is she oblivious to much of Angus’s behavior, but she is hypocritical when she judges his behavior. She seems to lack fundamental insight into her own values. Angus is a much steadier narrator, carefully withholding crucial information but maintaining a consistent story.  The question is whether it is true or not, and whether his reasonable voice is trusthworthy.

The other main flaw with the book is that the psychology of twins it gives is often just made up. Sarah meets with therapists and psychiatrists and does research on her own, and finds phenomena like the fascination of twins with mirrors and the heightened risk of bereaved twins for many psychological problems. It is clear that identical twins often have issues to do with identity and differentiation, but there’s no other evidence for the various claims that Tremayne provides in her text.  The website Twinless Twins does not provide corroboration for them.  This adds to the sense that Tremayne is just building up a sensationalist story to make a point, and it feels manipulative. 
The novel is successful in keeping the reader’s interest, wanting to find out both what happened in the past and what happens in the end.  The descriptions of the remote Scottish island are strong and evocative.  But the readings of the daughter’s upset voice in the unabridged audiobook are excessive

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York