Joan is at the zoo with her four-year-old son, Lincoln. It’s close to closing time and they are in the Dinosaur Discovery Pit, Lincoln playing a game with his superhero toys, when she hears a series of loud cracks. “She tries to imagine what anyone could be doing in a zoo that would sound like small explosions... they could not have been gunshots.” But as Joan and Lincoln meander towards the exit, she sees bodies, and a man with a gun. They’re in the middle of a mass shooting. Joan picks up Lincoln and runs.
Fierce Kingdom is the Alabama writer Gin Phillips’s fifth novel, her imagining of how a mother would react in this blackest of nightmares. It is panic-inducingly gripping as Joan dashes in her flip-flops for a hiding place while negotiating the questions and concerns of a four-year-old. “She can imagine clamping a hand over his mouth, holding him tight, ordering him to be perfectly still and perfectly quiet. She desperately wants that, but she cannot imagine a scenario where it is possible. If she scared him badly enough for him to stop talking, he would probably start sobbing.”
They hide in an empty animal enclosure, Joan texting her terrified husband, who has just realised where his wife and son are. She feels they’re as hidden as they can be. “Put your arms around me,” she whispers to Lincoln. “Close your eyes and disappear.” But time passes, the sun begins to set, and Lincoln starts to get hungry.
This is the sort of book that, by virtue of its horrific premise, is impossible to put down until its resolution. And beware, there is a scene that is really too disturbing to read: not for its goriness – Phillips doesn’t do gore – but for its sheer awfulness. It is also – and this was unexpected, in such a page-turning, adrenaline-soaked read – an eloquent and meditative insight into motherhood and what it means, its many small trials and joys and wonders.
Lincoln, thinks Joan, as she tries desperately to keep him quiet, “is packed to the brim with sound and movement, and one or the other is always spilling over the edges, and that is normally not a bad thing but now it makes her terror bubble to the surface”. With deft, careful memories and observations, Phillips brings this ordinary – and wonderful in his ordinariness – four-year-old to life. “There was the time when he looked up at her in a hotel lobby and announced, I have two little girls in my pocket. Tiny girls. One is named Lucy and one is named Fireman. There was the time when he told her that all his stuffed animals went to a church where no one wore pants.”
I’ve read two thrillers in recent months that I have adored – for their freshness and for the way they forced me to read them in a scarily obsessive fashion until I’d finished them. The first was Erica Ferencik’s The River at Night, in which four friends struggle to survive in the Maine wilderness after a white-water rafting accident. This is the second. Both are miles away from the prowling menace of domestic noir, or the carefully constructed mysteries of police procedurals. Here the challenge is pure survival, and it’s one hell of a ride watching these characters try to make it.
• Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips is published by Doubleday (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
