The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

A haunted house story set in England in the years just after WWII, The Little Stranger’s creepiness comes not just from the decaying mansion and its inhabitants, living and otherwise, but also from the claustrophobically rigid habits of thought of its extremely unreliable narrator.

The house is Hundreds Hall, a grand Georgian mansion now left to rot in the hands of the Ayres family: a bitter, disabled war veteran; his plain, sturdy, self-effacing sister; and their doddering, once-elegant widowed mother. Our protagonist, Dr. Faraday, is a country doctor who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps from working-class roots. In a supremely British way he is very conscious of this, and very white, and very male.

Ms. Waters does a terrific job creating a window into the mind of a man who has no idea how blinkered he is, or how condescending. He’s such a man of his place and time, the book almost reads as if it had been written by a man of that period. This is, to me, what makes it interesting: the character study of Dr. Faraday.

In his mind, there’s a natural order to things that it would never occur to him to question. People of the lower classes and women of all classes either function properly and stay in their places, in which case he can safely disregard them; or they don’t, in which case he can chasten them or doctor them or send them off to the appropriate institution.

Meanwhile, the Ayres family is terribly isolated. The local folks see them as wealthy and powerful, which of course they once were at one point, and therefore too snobbish to rub elbows with the hoi polloi. But it has been decades since the estate could support itself and in fact its inhabitants are reduced to selling it off, bit by bit, just to keep food in the pantry and gasoline in the generator.

The Ayreses, being both proud of their heritage and ashamed of their current financial state, feel they have to keep to themselves. Until Dr. Faraday appears on the scene and slowly insinuates himself into the household. Around the same time, things at The Hundreds start going weirdly amiss, and naturally the good doctor won’t entertain any supernatural explanations. Hijinks ensue and the plot thickens, with the assistance of everybody’s God-given prejudices.

Verdict: read it if you love a good haunted house story, or if you enjoy a well-written period piece whose characters’ psychology is true to their time and place, or if you just want to read the book first so you can sneer at the movie. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Dark Between by Sonia Gensler: #tbt review

Plucky, street-wise Kate is an orphan who has just lost her last hope of making an even vaguely respectable living. Frail, dreamy Elsie suffers from fits and can’t admit to anybody what she sees while she has them. Handsome, brooding Asher is just trying to get away from an American father he hates. 

The members of this ragtag group of Victorian teens find their various ways to London’s Summerfield College, where all is not as it seems. There have been mysterious deaths, and the three very different young people are going to have to start trusting each other before they can learn the disturbing truth--and how to deal with their own dark secrets.

This is an entertaining paranormal mystery in the gothic vein with fairly judicious touches of steampunk. It does suffer from a very common fault, that of putting characters with distinctly modern attitudes into a setting that is supposed to be more or less historical. Also, the vast majority of the story's tension revolves around the fact that these characters repeatedly fail to just come out and tell each other what they obviously need to know. 

Nonetheless, the story carries the reader along an amusing roller-coaster of a plot with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. Refreshingly, the obvious pair-off fails to materialize, and the way the lines between the spirit world and the world of hard-nosed scientific discovery are blurred is interesting in itself. A fun, light read for younger and middle teens.

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite: #tbt review

When I first read this book in 2002, it was still too soon after the 90s for me to realize just what a product of the 90s it really was (all the mansplaining about the magic you can do with a laptop and a modem becomes a little heavy-handed after a while, for example), and I was still too young to realize the degree to which Brite is maybe just a touch too close to her characters in all their just-post-teen rebellion. 

Rereading it in 2013, I concluded that in spite of my minor quibbles with it, this is a gorgeous, highly readable book. The settings are flawlessly painted, the characters have depths that they themselves aren't aware of, and, like all the best haunted-house stories, the plot hooks you remorselessly and draws you along until your knuckles are white and you are tempted to close the book--but you can't, because you have to know what happens next. Very, very worth reading.

Not convinced yet? Read this review by Paul Jr. on Goodreads.