My Two Cents: A VERITABLE HOUSEHOLD PET by Viggy Parr Hampton

Author Viggy Parr Hampton's latest release, A Veritable Household Pet, is a tale of two sisters. The eldest, Ellie, is a socially awkward and lonely girl who eventually becomes an ambitious and driven surgeon. The youngest, Darla, suffers from debilitating neuroses in her youth which lead her parents, in their desperation to "cure" her, to subject her to an "ice-pick" lobotomy when she is 12 years old. In doing so, the family trades one set of problems with Darla for another, and the book chronicles the ups, downs, and many twists and turns in Ellie and Darla's troubled relationship throughout their lives.

An "ice-pick" lobotomy involved driving a surgical implement resembling an ice pick through the back of the eye socket and into the brain, where it's then maneuvered to completely sever nerve connections in the frontal lobe. This brutal and controversial "treatment" was popular in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, but fell out of vogue in the early 1970s, which is when Darla undergoes the procedure in the book. And while the procedure has its desired effect in quelling Darla's previously overwhelming social anxiety and phobias, it's a case of "be careful what you wish for," as she's left pretty much an invalid as a result, unable to walk, talk, feed, or otherwise care for herself.

Over the years, often with Ellie's help, Darla regains many of these skills to some extent, but it's clear that she is incapable of living independently, and will need a lifelong caregiver. As Ellie grows older, she begins to realize this task will inevitably fall to her, and she doesn't want to it. Her childhood empathy and kindness toward her sister warps into something harder and crueler. She grows to resent Darla, seeing her first as a burden, then, unexpectedly as a rival, as in their teen years, Darla blossoms into a beautiful young woman. When a boy the teenaged Ellie fancies develops an eye instead for Darla, Ellie begins to envy and loathe her, sentiments that carry over into adulthood.

The story is presented in a unique narrative style, with dual first-person POVs from both Ellie and Darla. Their narratives intertwine, sometimes from sentence to sentence, distinguished from one another by distinctive typography changes for each. This sounds like it would be confusing to read, but it's not. Hampton is a unique and talented storyteller, and the transitions between Darla's comments and Ellie's are smooth, flawless, and fluid.

The character development in A Veritable Household Pet is likewise remarkable. It would have been easy to paint both sisters with broad brushstrokes, presenting them as caricatures: Darla, the dimwitted ingenue, and Ellie, the jealous older sister with a chip on her shoulder. Instead, Hampton gives us nuanced portraits of two painfully real young women, each struggling with her own problems, thoughts, and whirlwinds of emotions. As Ellie distances herself deliberately from Darla, trying to create as broad an emotional gap between them as a geographical one, Darla struggles to find emotional connections of any kind to anyone, all-too aware of the fact that even though she feels none, not even for those who take care of her, she should. These two divergent paths the sisters follow inevitably lead them together once again, and to a culminating moment that, at earlier points in the story, would have wrenched them irrevocably apart, but instead draws them closer.

In her afterword, Hampton explains that in fiction, horror has a broad lens, and in that sense, A Veritable Household Pet is indeed horror. The reality of the ice-pick lobotomy and its terrible effects on individuals who suffered through them, and the families left in the aftermath, is by any definition, horrific.

To me, A Veritable Household Pet is dark literary fiction, akin in tone to My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russel: a beautifully written, thought-provoking portrait not just of family dynamics and sibling rivalry, but of young women struggling to find autonomy and voice.

However you want to categorize it, A Veritable Household Pet is haunting and superb.

It's available here.