The Burning House by Neil Spring

Delighted to find this Neil Spring novel on Netgalley, having enjoyed The Watchers and Ghost Hunters. Spring writes a good variety of fiction related to the unexplained and even better, he's from South Wales 😉.

I didn't realise until the end that he had taken the story of the real Boleskin House and weaved the story around it. Boleskin sounds an absolutely fascinating place, owned by Alestair Crowley and Jimmy Page and reputedly incredibly haunted and the site of some odd rituals and occurrences. Spring explains in a footnote that a mysterious fire did really happen, do unfortunately you can't exactly visit the real place.

Boleskin house after the fire. 

The story is a fantastic mix of the paranormal and a psychological thriller. Clara is working as an estate agent trying to escape her tragic past by living in a small Scottish village on the edge of Loch Ness. In the course of her job she accidentally kills a man which is witnessed by a stranger, a man who had an unusual interest in the creepy dilapidated Boleskin house and is extremely into mind control and the rituals Crowley performed at the site.

The plot is skillfully woven around three main characters, and is gripping enough that I didn't want to put it down. Clara is a great character, and I thought that Spring did a good job with the mysterious stranger and Karl, Clara's abusive ex. The descriptions of Boleskin house are also very good. I would be interested to find out more about Crowley's philosophy, the philosophy of Thelema. The fantastically named Oswald Catternach believes that this philosophy entitles him to do whatever he wants, no matter how unethical. This is a shocking, sometimes gruesome but very well researched book and I highly recommend it.

A Victorian Gothic Novel Binge

Outside of getting quite behind on Les Mis, I am currently having a bit of a Victorian Gothic Novel Binge, having recently finished The Pleasures of Men (Kate Williams) and The Somnambulist (Essie Fox). I’ve also recently started Hide Me Among the Graves (Tim Powers). I adore Victorian novels as well as Victorian Gothic Fiction, I think it probably has to be my favourite genre and I’d been looking forward to the two I’ve just read (I discovered Tim Powers in the library). This is the ideal time of year for snuggling up with something lurid about creepy secrets. 

Both of them ended up getting three stars. I liked them but neither of the books gripped me and I was glad I borrowed them from the library. I think Kate will probably get much better with her next novel, but at the moment her style is a little too self-consciously literary and the book ended up confusing at times. I ended up feeling like I should be studying it, not reading it for fun. I did like the way that she subverted the idea of the Victorian heroine, with the secretly wicked Catherine, but I think Michael Faber did much better with Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White. Still, the descriptions of a London where people fear being murdered by the poor were very good. 

The Somnambulist was less self-conscious and contained less description of London, moving instead to the music halls and to Dinwood (Hampton) Court. I have to say I agree with the comments people made about the predictability of the plot at the beginning, but it didn’t really detract from the rest of the novel and I read it quite quickly. The ending was a bit rushed and strange, however. I can see that she wanted to end the book with a kind of symmetry, but it felt like she just stuck it in to finish the book quickly. I think she wanted the reader to be genuinely surprised by events, but I’m not sure I bought it.

Anyway, I shall carry on reading (or trying to read) the Tim Powers, alongside Umberto Eco’s new book which will have to go back to the library soon (it’s not thrilling me) as well as the other books I’m reading.