Sisters by Daisy Johnson review – complex and chilling

If I could bring any writer back from the dead, I think I’d choose Shirley Jackson, only because she’d write so very well about what it was like to be dead. But then again, I might not have to, because Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, her work a dark torrent of nightmarish images, her gothic vision startlingly vivid and distinctive.

Her first novel, the Booker-shortlisted Everything Under, was a watery piece of folk horror in which the relationship between the protagonist and her absent mother was scarcely less creepily compelling than the monster that lurked in the deeps, the Bonak. Now she gives us Sisters, a story that takes familiar themes and wraps them in the web of her careering lyricism and twisted imagination.

September and July are sisters, born 10 months apart and joined by some deep supernatural bond: when July, who narrates much of the novel, bites September’s arm, she can read her sister’s thoughts. In the wake of a terrible act of violence that is initially hinted at but left murky, the girls leave Oxford and head north to Yorkshire, to the Settle House, owned by their dead father’s sister.

Here they wait out summer days “flooded with dream logic”. Their mother, Sheela, is an author and illustrator “living in a sadness the colour of leather and rust”. She leaves the sisters to their own devices, seemingly overcome by the failure of her relationship with the girls’ father. There are occasional chapters in Sheela’s voice as the days play out and the tension ratchets ever higher.

The dynamic between the sisters becomes clear as they make a world for themselves in these new surroundings: September is wild, headstrong, danger-loving; July follows cautiously in her sister’s wake. July lives for her sister’s approbation: “She is the person I have always wanted to be. I am a shape cut out of the universe, tinged with ever-dying stars – and she is the creature to fill the gap I leave in the world.” They meet a group of boys on the beach and when September has sex with one of them, July feels the pain and pleasure in her own body.

The Settle House is itself a character in the novel - “a shifting and changing thing, awkward in its flesh, sometimes swelling and bloating out from its own walls, sometimes growing so warm the sweat pooled in her eyes”. It is load-bearing, July tells us, taking on “Mum’s endless sadness, September’s fitful wrath, my quiet failures to ever do quite what anyone needs me to do, the seasons, the death of small animals in the scrublands around it, every word that we say in love or anger to one another”.

Eventually, we pick our way back through traumatically occluded memories to the events in Oxford. We meet Kirsty, Lily and Jennifer, mean girls who trick July into a very public act of self-revelation. We witness September’s rage, her planned revenge. A storm sweeps in. Johnson’s prose comes at you in jagged bursts.

The fact that most readers will see the final twist coming doesn’t undermine its power. Indeed, there’s something interesting in the way that Johnson uses readerly expectation and generic convention to her advantage, timing her revelations perfectly, allowing the reader to hear echoes of other writers without the novel ever feeling derivative or formulaic.

Careful readers will find many pieces of treasure buried here, including several references to Johnson’s 2016 short story collection, Fen. The fact that the plot of Sisters follows relatively well-worn paths allows Johnson to be more inventive and experimental in her use of language and in her characterisation. This is a novel Shirley Jackson would have been proud to have written: terrifically well-crafted, psychologically complex and chillingly twisted.

• Sisters by Daisy Johnson is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15