Review - House of Splinters by Laura Purcell

House of Splinters

Laura Purcell
Raven Books, 9 October 2025
Available as: HB, 349pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781526627230

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of House of Splinters to consider for review.

House of Splinters is a bewitching ghost story, a return to the world of The Silent Companions and a prequel of sorts, its events set at the end of the 18th century and drawing on the same, early 16th century background, as a young couple, Belinda and Wilfrid Bainbridge, attempt to make The Bridge their home.

Ancestral taint is thick here. There is not only the history of witch Anne Bainbridge, but a vivid implication of the present-day Bainbridges benefiting from colonial rapacity. Wilfrid's black sheep brother has been employed by the East India Company. Belinda's father and brother are engaged in the West Indies trade, with all the implications of that. And Wilfrid himself is, with whatever handwringing, about to turn the villagers off the common so that he can enclose it for wheat.

That background of cursed wealth is reflected in a panoply of gothic horror that strikes the family and their servants. Belinda is already predisposed to fear the house, after events five years before when her sone was born there, and she soon recognises that its malice is particularly directed at her and her newborn, Lydia. But what is the cause of that malice, and can it be placated? 

I really enjoyed this book. A good example of the gothic is, in my experience, quite rare. It's not enough to deploy the trappings - the bumps in the night, the isolated location, the sudden scares - you need to build, and continually deny, that growing atmosphere of claustrophobia and suppressed panic. Purcell is one author who can reliably do this with her novels that leverage the position of women in a patriarchal society into a fraught sense of confinement (literal in Belinda's case with the use of that term as she approaches childbirth). House of Splinters is a brilliant example of that, Lydia unable to take the actions she needs due to matters of convention, money and status, not least the patriarchal headship of her husband (however nice a man he may seem to be).

I sensed a little touch here of Wilkie Collins in the way that Belinda's plight isn't only due to the supernatural, but she is also trapped by societal conventions and mysogyny, but also in the strength and resourcefulness she shows in seeking to protect herself and her children. And the novel ends on an eerie, threatening hint of what's to come in the future.

All in all, an exciting, frightening and atmospheric book, perfect for the dark nights.

For more information about House of Splinters, see the author's website here.

Review - We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough

We Live Here Now

Sarah Pinborough
Orion, 5 June 2025 
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398722606

I'm grateful to Orion for giving me access to an advance e-copy of We Live Here Now  to consider for review.

Sarah Pinborough is the queen of the domestic tragedy, where a middle class couple have their brittle stability upset by secrets, physiological flaws and a twist of the supernatural - which sometimes seems to have been conjured by a darkness emanating from the apparent contented pair.

We Live Here Now explores just such a setup, pairing it with a convincingly Gothic setting - Larkin Lodge, a brooding house on Dartmoor, a place that, as the opening section hints with its references to Jane Eyre, has its own secrets.  It's expertly done and Pinborough guides her readers in and out of sympathy with the main protagonist, Emily, making the outlandish goings on here seem almost unexceptional and certainly quite believable.

Emily is coming to terms with drastic changes in her life, as the job she'd staked so much on is taken away from her in the aftermath of a dreadful accident. Troubled by guilt and loss, she doubts herself, she doubts her husband Freddie and, one feels, has thrown herself into the project of buying and occupying Larkin Lodge as a way of avoiding the need to confront all that. 

Freddie has his own demons - I think the reader will suspect from fairly early on that it's one of two possible things, either likely to wreck his and Emily's relationship. 

In chapters written from the point of view of each, we are soon shown the facts, but more importantly, the layers of self-justification, the accusations, and increasingly, the poisonous state of the relationship. It's all rather compelling, rather horrifying and rather ominous. And that's before Emily starts feeling there is... something... about the house.

This build was impressive - there were so many ways things might go - with an atmosphere of moral taint, a feeling that something about Larking Lodge is alive and reaching out, that Emily and Freddie - and those who lived there before them - is reaching out. But it's puzzling. As Emily becomes obsessed with the Lodge and begins to research it, she doesn't discover a simple history of tragedies. There are former owners who seem to have had a good life there. How to square that with her own feelings of distress?

Maybe it's Emily that is the problem.

That's certainly what Freddie decides.

With overtones of gaslighting, coercion and manipulation, We Live Here Now goes to some very dark places indeed. Equally at home providing the reader with a plausible nexus between individual despair and the supernatural, and a pin-sharp portrayal of middle class life and relationships, Pinborough has written a story that grabbed me and made sure I kept on until the final catastrophe(s) are resolved - or not, given the very unsettling final section.

I loved seeing the shout outs to other authors, including to a particular supernatural series whose author recently died, as well as the sense of time-encrusted mystery around what is actually wrong with Larkin Lodge and when it all began.

I would strongly recommend We Live Here Now.

For more information about We Live Here Now, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Other Lives of Miss Emily White by AJ Elwood

The Other Lives of Miss Emily White  
AJ Elwood
Titan Books, 11 April 2023
Available as: PB, 317pp,  e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803363707

I'm grateful to Titan Books for sending me a copy of The Other Lives of Miss Emily White to consider for review.

AJ Elwood/ Alison Littlewood is of course a master of suspense whether in a modern or a historical setting, so I was expecting great things from The Other Lives of Miss Emily White, but I have to say this story surpassed even them.

Introduced by Ivy, an elderly woman living alone in the 1920s, the action takes place 60 years before in an unremarkable Yorkshire Victorian girls' school, a slightly down at heel establishment devoted to applying some polish to young ladies so that they can find themselves husbands. The teenage Ivy is a farmer's daughter who's looked down on by her snobbish classmates - and there's a whiff of scandal about her. Children can, of course, be very cruel and while there's little overt bullying here, Ivy is very much a target. She recalls how how poverty brought her to this place and what it means to her to have been wrenched from her happy life and especially from her sister, Daisy.

The arrival of a new teacher, Miss White/ Madam Blanc, brings drama to Miss Dawson's Seminary from the very beginning. Drama, tragedy, and the malign attention of Ivy's peers as they sense a potential victim in the young schoolmistress. So begins a battle of wills, made more confusing and dangerous by apparent sightings of Miss White in places where she's not.

There are secrets here - secrets belonging to Ivy, secrets belonging to Sophia, Miss White's chief tormentor, and secrets belonging to Miss White herself. Secrets, and layers of pretence. The farmers' daughters being made into gentlewomen. The horse, painted with a blaze to resemble his dead predecessor. The solidly English teachers, always called by French names. Perhaps, too, a level of pretence so fundamental that it's subconscious, invisible to those taking part. 

Pretence, and doublings. Around them swirl the currents of emotions of those young ladies, isolated from their families and being moulded into something they're not - the book opens with a chilling prospectus written by Erasmus Darwin, setting out how girls are to be educated. You can sense the  contradictions and the turmoil. Who, exactly, is Miss White? What are her intentions regarding Ivy? What are Ivy's intentions, if it comes to that? Just what is going on? It's a deeply uneasy setting even more a whiff of the supernatural appears...

I felt this story really captured the confusions of late childhood/ early adulthood, an age when reality is malleable and outrageous fancies may be spun into truth. That, and a sense of hauntedness, drive a taut and lingering horror story that will remain with you long after you close the book.

For more information about The Other Lives of Miss Emily White, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

Under the Whispering Door
TJ Klune
Pan Macmillan/ Tor, 28 October 2021
Available as: HB, 384pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529087970

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Under the Whispering Door.

Price was dead, to begin with...

TJ Klune casts light and wisdom on the mysteries of life and death in this engaging new novel.

Wallace Price would not be anyone's idea of a sympathetic boss. Seen early on in Under the Whispering Door firing an unfortunate employee whose life problems are affecting her work, he is driven, unempathetic and demanding. So it's hardly surprising when, after his sudden death, only a handout of people attend Wallace's funeral. Wallace himself IS surprised by that: but more at having actually, you know, died. Basically he's having trouble accepting this whole "deceased" thing and so a Reaper has to be despatched to escort him to - well, we'll come to that.

Yes, there are overtones of everybody's favourite spooky Dickens novel here. Like Scrooge, Wallace wasn't always a work-obsessed misanthropist: like Scrooge he knew love, but it turned sour on him. But there are also differences. Wallace isn't quite the caricature that Scrooge is. And while Scrooge was offered visions of what may come - including the prospect of going to the grave unmourned and unsung - and time to amend his life, no such luxury is accorded Wallace. His time's up, and he's out.

The biggest difference, though, lies I think, in the dynamics of what happens after Wallace's death. In many respects, his life only begins then. Accompanied by reaper Mei (pronounced "May") whose first gig this is,  Wallace is led to a teashop, run by Hugo, also inhabited - haunted? - by Hugo's dead grandfather Nelson and dead dog Apollo. The teashop - Charon's Crossing - isn't some weird borderland thing, it's an actual, genuine teashop serving a range of infusions to the customers as well as home made scones and other baked goods. 

(I need to stop here to smile for a moment over what are clearly difference between the associations of "teashop" in the US and the UK. From the reaction Klune puts into Wallace's head, Over There it has clear overtones of aching hipsterdom, while this side of the Atlantic one thinks of crumbs, chintz and copper ornaments, also probably steamed up windows and rain).

Actually Charon's Crossing DOES have some weird borderline characteristics. It hosts The Door through which Wallace and his fellow deceased will eventually travel (to where? we never learn). It also holds those who need to spend time reconciling themselves with the fact of death, or with the way they spent their lives. And it provides a locus for all kinds of half-and-half entities to mingle with the living - such as those who rejected the idea of death entirely and lost themselves under the winnowing forces of the mundane world. 

Yes, there is some spooky stuff here, but it doesn't dominate and, honestly, it was a breath fo fresh air to read a novel with such a definite, unambiguous fantasy setting but which doesn't all turn on some threat to the nature of reality, or an evil plot by beings from Beyond to conquer the universe. Instead, we get tea and chat and honest, often painful, character development. I know that won't perhaps be everybody's cup of tea (pun intended) but it is done so very well here and really grabbed my attention and sympathy. At Charon's Crossing, the focus is on being, not doing. And - to let a bit of a spoiler slip - the being is especially focused on Wallace (who, is, of course, dead) and Hugo (very much alive), with a thread of romance between these very different men. And of course some definite obstacles in the way.

Quite how Klune orchestrates and explores this theme, I won't say any more about - first because it would be spoilery and secondly, because it would only clumsily sum up what's set out much better in the book, and why do that? But it does involve human loss, a vengeful ghost, a podcasting medium and a besmitten public health inspector, creating a darkly comic plot that surrounds the central romantic one, so there is a lot here to hold the attention.

What you need to do then, is, to put the kettle on; warm the teapot; cut yourself a slice of cake; settle down, and read Under the Whispering Door. You won't regret it...

For more information about Under the Whispering Door, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Cover by Mel Four/
Pan Macmillan art dept

Black Water Sister
Zen Cho
Pan Macmillan, 10 June 2021
Available as: HB, 370pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley
ISBN(HB): 9781447299998

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Black Water Sister via NetGalley

Black Water Sister is an absorbing story. It is firmly set in the modern world, taking place on the bustling island of Penang, yet blends that with a sympathetic take on traditional magic, mythology and indeed, gods.

Jessamyn ("Jess") and her parents are Chinese Malaysians. They have lived in the USA, where Jess's parents went to work, since she was five years old. After her father loses his job and suffers a health scare, the family return to Penang and are living with relatives (Jess's aunt Kor Kor and her husband). Jess's dad is carrying out pretty menial work for her uncle, and she and her mother feel he's being taken advantage of - but they're being provided with somewhere to stay so are under something of an obligation. It's a delicate situation, and Jess doesn't want to upset things. 

However, we know two things from the start of this book, both threatening no end of upset. First, Jess is gay. Secondly, she's being haunted by a ghost who is, she soon learns, that of her grandmother, Ah Ma. Granny drags Jess into a complicated feud involving a businessman with criminal connections, rival Chinese deities and the history of that sprawling family. Jess is, of course, resistant at first and thinks she's losing her mind but she eventually has to accept, reluctantly, the reality of what's going on - and, even more reluctantly, that Ah Ma will get her into deep trouble unless she helps out.

Playing out in the background is the fascinating story of Jess's large family, its hopes and fears, preferences and prejudices, something she navigates on a daily basis. The fact that Jess has been brought up abroad is a superb alibi for Zen Cho to explain cultural references that the Western reader may not quite get - as well as creating a layer of friction for Jess since she's, ever so slightly, out of step with everyone else. There's a nice description, a kind of inversion of the normal picture, showing the effect of exile when Jess sees her parents - who she's previously regarded as quite reserved people -  suddenly becoming very social, and realises that's who they really are when they are at home and relaxed rather than among strangers. 

But Jess doesn't have much time to understand the impact of emigration on her family, or how it feels for them to be home, apparently defeated by the land of promise they thought they were going to. No. The story gets very thrillery, with plenty of action, characters who are morally conflicted and Jess herself desperately trying to work out exactly how this strange world she's entered - a world of mediums and endlessly bickering Chinese gods, of hoodlums, of downtrodden building workers - actually works. It would be so much easier if she could depend on Ah Ma for guidance and advice but she turns out to be a somewhat mercurial person (while, I think, subtly educating Jess all the same).

As if that wasn't enough, Jess is trying to combine all this with maintaining a long-distance relationship with her girlfriend Sharanya (especially as Jess isn't out to her parents, and is desperately afraid that they will reject her). There are tensions here, things Jess doesn't want to share about her new life and the sheer pressure of events - and being in a crowded house - make sit hard to take those calls. Jess's dilemma here, even as a self assured young woman who knows what she is and shat she wants, is painful to see.

It's a well written book that draws the reader further and further in, exploring so many cross cultural themes - not only US culture contrasting with this part of Asia, but also the position of the Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia, the accommodation of the ancient (and not so ancient) gods with the modern world, the place of Christians (Jess's aunt is one) and much more. There are also some sharp contrasts even within cultures: such as the way those traditional gods came to be - the male gods often having been reverend holy men, the female ones, unfortunate woman scarred by violence and so raised to the status of deities. Part of Jess's quest is to discover the truth about a particular god, the Black Water Sister of the title, presented by some as a violent and vengeful spirit (and accordingly, used for that purpose) but who actually has a rather more interesting history. Jess needs to understand, and quickly, if she's to outwit gods, her grandmother, the mobsters and other sundry dangers.

And at the end of the day, she also needs to work out her relationships with her family and Sharanya. 

And find a way to earn a living.

So - there is a LOT going on here, but Zen Cho shapes this material into a sharp, readable and fun book. I'd strongly recommend Black Water Sister.

For more information about Black Water Sister, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood #NetGalley #MistletoeBook

Mistletoe
Alison Littlewood
Jo Fletcher Books (Quercus), 10 October 2019
HB, e, 304pp

Today marks publication of Alison Littlewood's latest unsettling horror tale, Mistletoe. I'm delighted to be able to join the book's blogtour and grateful to Quercus for a free advance e-copy via Netgalley.

'The night was filled with thoughts of mistletoe, dreams of mistletoe, the touch of it on her skin, the grasping tendrils entangling her limbs...'

I've loved Alison Littlewood's books right back to A Cold Season and here she is again at her icy best, telling the story of a woman alone, out among the snows of a Yorkshire winter, as Christmas approaches. (This book would definitely make an atmospheric Christmas read - or present - if you're looking for one).

Leah, mourning the loss of her son and her husband, has given up her city life - 'The world of cars and buses stinking of diesel, of towering buildings and grey streets, of all-night supermarkets and corner-shops, of anonymous crowds' - and exchanged it for 'a farmhouse, a barn, an apple orchard and a single field'. She's a 'comer-inner', having bought the (dilapidated) holding and intending to spend her time renovating the house, which husband Josh discovered and set his heart on before his death. Whether Leah is trying to forget Josh and son Finn or, somehow, come closer in this place where she'd imagined a new life with them, isn't clear.

Of course Maitland Farm isn't the rural idyll that Leah hoped for. Between a dirty, uncared for house with no working heating, Arctic weather, her haunting memories, a barn full of sinister junk including the creepiest doll outside Stephen King and a sense of wrongness, Leah's hopes are soon driven out by, not fears exactly (that would be simply sorted: back to the city!) but a growing disquiet.

Littlewood is a master at building up tension - escalating things slowly, springing her trap, then stepping back: oh, it wasn't a ghost, it was a neighbour accustomed to crossing the field rather than using the lane.

Or was it?

Here the tension builds credibly on top of Leah's already low, troubled spirits, the reader never being sure whether, when an odd thing happens, it's actually supernatural or born of her love and longing for Josh and Finn (or her lack of sleep). Perhaps it's impossible to disentangle all these? Suppose there are ghosts at Maitland Farm. Wouldn't that open a channel, a possibility, a way to Josh and Finn? So tempting. So very tempting. But at the same time, given the horrors that Leah begins to suspect - the hints she picks up form her neighbours about a dark past and about revenge and ill-luck on the house - what dangers might wait? The story keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, even as it takes a dark turn.

This book is a brilliantly creepy, atmospheric horror story. It wrings every last drop out of the dark side of Christmas: the bitter mistletoe berries, the cold of ancient sacrifice, the short days and above all, perhaps, the pain of being alone at a time of communal cheer and jollity. It is also a story of loss and vulnerability - there is a real sense that in placing herself where she has, Leah opened up to a real and terrible darkness. We begin to see echoes between events in the distant past - events that are impressed in the crumbling stone and barren soil of the farm - and Leah's own life. And the skin of the 21st century seems awfully thin at Maitland Farm ('Here, the past didn't fade to nothing...') with a potential, a dreadful potential, to draw her into its Midwinter dance, perhaps with a seductive hope.

There is also bewitching, lyrical prose here: 'The snow was constantly changing: now rose-tinted or grey, now golden or lavender, made new with every dawn or noon or evening and yet just as cold...' Littlewood vividly describes not only the horrors glimpsed in the shadows but the colour and sound and the bleakness of a hard winter.

It is, simply, a delight to read, a horror story but also a beautiful study of a woman very close to the edge, of friendship, loss and courage. Strongly recommended. (And if you haven't read Littlewood's previous books yet, you must: you have a treat in store. You can thank me later).

For more information about the book, see the publisher's webpage here. For other reviews of Mistletoe, see the blogs in the poster below. You can buy the book from your local bookshop, including via Hive Books which supports high street bookshops, from Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones, WH Smith or Amazon (and other places too).

Blogtour review - The Lingering by SJI Holliday

Cover by kid-ethic.com

The Lingering
SJI Holliday
Orenda, 15 November 2018
PB, e 252pp

Today, I'm joining the blogtour for SJI (Susi) Holliday's new gothic creeper, The Lingering. I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne the tour organiser for an advance copy of the book to review for the blogtour.

This book really resonated with me, and I'm delighted to welcome Susi and Orenda Books to the Balloon!


The book

Married couple Jack and Ali Gardiner move to a self-sufficient commune in the English Fens, desperate for fresh start. The local village is known for the witches who once resided there and Rosalind House, where the commune has been established, is a former psychiatric home, with a disturbing history...


My review

A few miles from where I live there is a former Victorian asylum, long one of the main institutions in Berkshire but converted four or five years ago for housing. It stands on the the edge of a village, surrounded by fields and now turned into flats, with houses in the grounds. Several years ago my wife and I went to take a look with our daughter, then in her mid teens. This was really for something to do more than any serious intent to buy.

If you follow this blog or my Twitter keenly (you don't follow this blog or my Twitter keenly) you may already know that Daughter has autism and profound learning disabilities. She doesn't speak; we are not really sure how much language she understands but she certainly wouldn't have understood from us what that place had been. It seemed nice enough, with lots of greenery outside and some nice modern design in the flats yet she took against it and wouldn't step inside for a moment.

I don't want to get all spooky here but I think there is such a thing as the power of place. That building must, I imagine, a hundred of so years ago, have had a number of residents just like my daughter her and I think she sensed something of that.

There is such a thing as the power of place, whether it be the knowledge of what's happened there, awareness of the sorts of people associated with a place, or something less tangible, something impressed on the place itself. It is something that SJI Holliday draws on heavily in The Lingering, which is set in such a former asylum, albeit one now housing a New Age community, "Our Family".

The forbidding, slightly Gothic pile.

The empty wards and abandoned equipment.

Creaking floorboards and gurgling pipes.

It all makes for a troubling atmosphere, even as we read extracts from Smeaton's (the leader of the group's) "Book of Light" asserting the power of positivity.

There is, though, more to the Gothic than the physical lumber of our dark imaginations. Without credible characters you just have so many draughty rooms and bumps in the night. And it's with her characters that Holliday makes this book so hellishly creepy. Ali and Jack are coming to Rosalind House, seemingly for sanctuary and a new start far from their past lives. But, of course, they can't help but bring those lives along for the ride. Why has Smeaton welcomed them so enthusiastically? And why is Angela so fascinated by them - why is she spying on them?

The really scary, Gothicness of this book is the tangle between the secret lives of Rosalind House's  residents. Their secrets, lies and intentions. There's an almost visceral sense of something wrong (what?), of pressure building, of something about to give way (but again, what?) And while we may be forming suspicions, it's impossible to tell who is innocent, who is guilty, who is manipulating, coercing, controlling in this self-enclosed, inwardly focused community.

Above, where it might all lead, as events spiral beyond anyone's control - even the master manipulator's.

With all this in play, the actual hints of the supernatural, and the reasons for it, are almost superfluous. I'm not sure any ghost could match the depths of evil of an actual, living, human being but the genius of this book is to keep open the channel between the two, as it were, blurring realities, reversing causes and effects and then - in a truly audacious twist - turning the whole thing upside down.

It's a nailbiting story, a nailbiting ghost story, and I think Holliday is going to keep many readers up  into troubled early hours with this book.


The Author

SJI Holliday

SJI (Susi) Holliday is a pharmaceutical statistician by day and a crime and horror fan by night. Her short stories have been published in many places and she was shortlisted for the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham prize with her story ‘Home from Home’, which was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in spring 2017. She is the bestselling author of the creepy and claustrophobic Banktoun trilogy (Black Wood, Willow Walk and The Damselfly) featuring the much-loved Sergeant Davie Gray, and has dabbled in festive crime with the critically acclaimed The Deaths of December. Her latest psychological thriller is modern gothic with more than a hint of the supernatural, which she loved writing due to her fascination and fear of ghosts. She is proud to be one of The Slice Girls and has been described by David Mark as 'Dark as a smoker's lung.' She divides her time between Edinburgh and London and you will find her at crime-fiction events in the UK and abroad.

You can buy The Lingering from your local independent bookshop via Hive Books, from Waterstones, Blackwell's or Amazon (UK) or (US) and of course from many other places too.

(Finally - and I know I am a shallow person - but isn't that cover amazing? It makes me feel dizzy just looking at it...)

Review - Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi

Cover design by Sue Michniewicz

Summerland
Hannu Rajaniemi
Gollancz, 28 June 2018
PB, 322pp
Source: Advance copy from the publisher (thank you!)

'The windmill you are tilting at is very high and ancient and English: Privilege...'

Well. (or should I say, Wells...?)

This is a strange one. It's a mashup of classic espionage (1930s, British Empire vs Soviet Union, a molehunt and traitors among the gilded products of elite English education) with horror (through some higher dimensional maths, the afterlife has been discovered so Spooks can literally be... spooks), overtones of steampunk (Queen Victoria rules from beyond the grave in her Summer Court) there are spirit crowns and the "coppery weave of spirit armour" and a dash of paradoxical mathematics (how can one rely on a system that must, logically, contain contradictions?)

It must, I think, take a good dose of self-belief to make such a thing work, as this does, combined with the ability to spin a great story. This account of Rachel White's thankless service for a thankless Service - she's an outsider, as a mere woman, also suspect as a married woman, shouldn't she have given up her job? - is certainly a great story. (I think all the best spy books need an outsider, someone who's prepared to judge, make a stir, in the secret world).

And Rajaniemi is assured in the way he makes the fantasy stuff - the ghosts, Summerland itself, the crowns and mediums and so on - a key part of the story, not just something tacked on. This is an alternate world. There is "Oxford Court" Tube line. Ectotanks win wars. Lenin has become "The Presence" - a steely hive mind. There may still be a Civil War in Spain, but its stakes are different, higher than in our universe. The science is different too, with a forgotten dead-end of 19th century science raised to the status of truth*. One of the fun things about the book is how much reality Rajaniemi allows to bleed in, whether it's the Prime Minister, modelled on HG Wells (see if you can spot the references to his books), the (real and alleged) spies and traitors who surround Rachel or indeed the mathematics and logic.

That makes the story seem more of a game than it is, this is a genuinely compelling narrative, focussing as it does on the frustrated life of Rachel White, the obscure, flailing motivations of Peter Bloom and on the wider, corrosive effect of the Empire's control of the spirit world. Bluntly, there is no more death, those assured of a "Ticket" can find their way to Summerland, where a little society has been build up (from bricks made of dead souls...) there to live out their deaths for eternity, even able to contact the living by "etheric telephone". It's to Rajaniemi's credit that he makes this whole edifice seem not only plausible but inevitable - as are the downsides. With no more life and death, what matters anymore? Only the most desperate loss is real now, such as a pregnancy that ended early or a soul literally consumed by one of those aetheric tanks. And with death, at large.defeated, what grief, what guilt, might be loaded on those affected by those rare true deaths?

So - whether as a story of tradecraft, spooks (of both kinds), mysterious files and of treachery, as one of horror and meddling with things We Were Not Meant To Know or as a sad and moving human tale dwelling on the aftereffects of loss, this would be a great book. As a blend of all three, it's unputdownable. The writing is sharp ("The raindrops tasted like fear") with the whole concept allowing for the emotional core of the story to be made literal ("the soul-fragments he carried from the War spilled out and made cold spots in the bedroom...", "the best of what the British Empire had to offer, spun from aether and made solid by collective belief." ) and Rajaniemi isn't above sly references to the classics of spy fiction (so, to a character shivering in the yard: 'Why don't you come in from the cold and tell us all about it?'  Altogether a triumph, and I'd strongly recommend it.

For more about the book see the publisher's website here.

-----

*Aether atoms. The idea is that space is filled with an invisible fluid, the aether, which is the stuff that supports light waves (as the air supports sounds waves). The idea of aether fell out of favour, not so much disproved as shown by Einstein to be unnecessary. In this world things took a different turn, and an idea that was seriously considered before Einstein - that atoms can then be imagined as more or less complicated, endlessly spinning aether vortices - essentially knots - plays an important part in its physics.

Review - A Game of Ghosts by John Connolly

A Game of Ghosts
John Connolly
Hodder, 6 April 2017
HB, 454pp

I'm grateful to Hodder for an advance copy of the book.

It is deep winter. The darkness is unending.

The private detective named Jaycob Eklund has vanished, and Charlie Parker is dispatched to track him down. Parker's employer, Edgar Ross, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has his own reasons for wanting Eklund found.

Eklund is no ordinary investigator. He is obsessively tracking a series of homicides and disappearances, each linked to reports of hauntings. Now Parker will be drawn into Eklund's world, a realm in which the monstrous Mother rules a crumbling criminal empire, in which men strike bargains with angels, and in which the innocent and guilty alike are pawns in a game of ghosts . . .

I read a lot, but it's both frustrating and wonderful to realise that there are still so many excellent authors and series that I have never yet touched. Frustrating, because HOW CAN I READ MORE and wonderful because - well, because I can discover books like this.

I'm extra, extra grateful to have encountered Charlie Parker in this his - I think - 16th(!) adventure.

Parker is a PI, based in New England, and one cold winter he's drawn into investigating the disappearance of fellow PI Jaycob Eklund. The case takes him to some places - and people - that are far from nice, far from rational - whether the strange, extended Brethren and their ghostly companions or the daunting Mother, boss of a crime family and herself a deeply creepy being.

At the same time Parker is wrestling to keep contact with his daughter when protective ex wife Rachel seeks to have contact cut off. A strength of the book is that it shows how both Rachel and Charlie are right... but also wrong. A sad situation, that vulnerable, fallible human beings are trying (and failing) not to make worse.

Parker isn't, though, without resources of his own. Shadowed by the enigmatic Collector and his Hollow Men (I'll have to read the earlier books to understand what they're about) he has more solid assistance from henchmen (and couple) Angel and Louis. (The way the relationship between them is sketched is masterful: even without reading the earlier books you sense the history there).

Even Parker's daughter, Sam, who was recently the target of an abduction, has more to her than is obvious (and just what she'll come to has yet to play out in the series).

In a story where nobody is what they seem, and the stakes veer from violent crime to cultish bargains with supernatural entities, it seems that absolutely anything can happen - with the real question being how many innocents will suffer along the way.

And they do.

I was slightly taken aback by Connolly's... prodigality... with his characters. He lavishes as much care and attention on developing the background and life of someone who'll die halfway through the book (or sooner!) as on Parker, Sam and the others: all seem real, of worth, making the losses and deaths all the more horrific.

Game of Ghosts is an  amazing mash-up between the ghoulish - with nods to Lovecraft in the New England setting and especially using Providence as one of the main locations - and the hard-boiled (that background of PIs in shabby offices with gangsters in the background). There is a real sense of tension as we wait to see if Parker can unravel the threads before this victim dies, or if not this one, that one - even as others are working from the opposite direction, ruthlessly killing to keep their existence, their very souls, secret...

It's profoundly unsettling, gripping reading - and I enjoyed every minute. Not having read any of the earlier books wasn't a problem - Connolly does a few recaps to bring the reader up to date, and the mysterious background adds rather than detracts from the effect - but this did give me an appetite for more and I rather think I'll have to read them now from the start.

Strongly recommended, atmospheric, horror, a good entry to this series and wonderful, realistic, prickly, fallible characters.

Halloween Roundup

I don't normally pay that much attention to Hallowe'en in bookish terms, but I've noticed as the nights have got darker an excellent run of spooky or horrific books tends to appear. (This year there's also a run of books on Hygge - maybe scope for a crossover there?) And on Sunday the clocks go back, giving an extra hour for reading, and darker evenings.

So I thought I'd do a roundup. Autumn and winter are just right for reading on the dark side, and it'll soon be Christmas (it will!) the very best time of year for ghost stories - so here are some that have come up, some of which I've read and some I haven't.

First up is My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix (Quirk Books, 17 May) which is very much at the concept end of horror: an Eighties themed hybrid of Beaches, Mean Girls and The Exorcist styled a little like a High School yearbook, by the author of Horrorstör. Grady turned up here in May to write a piece about how his high school years and horror writing weren't too far apart...

Ideal to get you in the mood for an Eighties themed Hallowe'en party - or as a present to your host perhaps.

Next, and while The Exorcist is in your mind, in September I reviewed A Head Full of Ghosts (Titan Books, 27 September) by Paul Tremblay - superior possession fiction (perhaps it's possession fiction) with a modern twist: is was all done on reality TV, which, as we know, never lies. How to make this rather hackneyed genre fresh, when every book written is in the shadow of that predecessor and has to refer to it? Tremblay knows. Accept the self-referentiality. Glory in it. 

Indeed, let the story analyse itself. Let your characters - or at least some of them - be conscious of all that baggage. Let the possession itself be the subject of a reality TV show, introducing another layer of artificiality to this already artificial situation. Then add more. And more. A blogger, 15 years later, reviewing and analysing the TV series. One of the family, putting forward her side of things in a book. Unfinished business. 

Like A Head Full of Ghosts, The Family Plot by Cherie Priest (Macmillan, 20 September) is set in the US, but in a very different locale. It's Southern, with a nasty, spooky house - basically that old place strangers are warned to stay away from, set for demolition. Driven by the need to make some money and save their firm as it totters on the brink of bankruptcy, Dahlia and her crew of architectural salvagers begin to take the place apart. But what ghost would welcome such a thing? Chilling, tense and with a genuine mystery at its heart, this book really did haunt me...

October saw a crop of excellent ghost stories, as you'd expect. First was Thin Air by Michelle Paver (Orion, 6 October). Superficially similar to her earlier Dark Matter (also excellent) this is another story in which plucky heroes of Empire go a bit too far into the wilds and stir up something they can't bear to acknowledge, let alone cope with. It's easy to dismiss the superstitions of the 'natives' until they come back and bite you. Whether you read this as a plan ghost story or perhaps a bit of a parable of Empire, it's equally chilling.

Alison Littlewood is one of the authors I now look out for a story from each autumn: she's written a series of horror stories set firmly in the late 20th/ early 21st centuries, but with The Hidden People (Jo Fletcher, 6 October) she has gone back into the 19th with a tale of fairies - but these are not kind, nice, absurd fairies but scary fairies... If they're real, that is. If they're not real, there is still horror abroad but it might (gasp) be as much a matter of evil - of human misogyny and prejudice - as if they did. Albie Mirralls is the son of a prosperous family, working at his father's firm in the City. Early in the book we see the two visit the Great Exhibition of 1851 along with Albie's cousin, Lizzie, and her father. A connection is made between the two that endures, albeit sleeping, until after her death a decade later. When Lizzie is horrifically killed by her husband, who has come to believe that she's a changeling, a fairy, Albie sets off for the Yorkshire village of Halfoak, to investigate...

Susan Hill is another author who supplies regular frights (as well as other sorts of books) and a new collection of short stories by her is an event to treasure. I have my copy of The Travelling Bag (Profile, 29 September) but I haven't read it yet - I'm saving this one till Christmas! 

Finally, I wanted to mention Warren the 13th and the All-seeing Eye (24 November 2015) and Warren 13th and the Whispering Woods (not out yet, sorry!) - two beauties from Quirk Books beautifully written by Tania del Rio and beautifully illustrated by Will Staehle.

Warren the 13th is  a cursed twelve-year-old Victorian bellhop who's terribly unlucky, yet perpetually optimistic, hard-working, and curious. Warren's pride and joy is his family's Warren Hotel, but he's been miserable ever since his evil Aunt Anaconda took over the management. Anaconda believes a mysterious treasure known as The All-Seeing Eye is hidden somewhere in the walls of the hotel, and she'll do anything to find it. If Warren wants to preserve his family's legacy, he'll need to find the treasure first - if the hotel's many strange and wacky guests don't beat him to it!

These look just the sort of thing to curl up by the fire with and read to your children on those dark nights I keep going on about. Or yourself, if you don't have any children. 

Finally, just LOOK AT THIS (just in - my order arrived today) - a graphic novel version of some of MR James's ghost stories, by Leah Moore and John Reppion. Whether you've read these stories and want a new take, to justify reading again: or you've never read them and wonder where to start - this is ideal. 

Whatever you choose, have a scary time in those long, dark nights...

Thin Air

Image from www.orionbooks.co.uk

Thin Air
Michelle Paver
Orion, 6 October 2016
HB, 240pp
I'm grateful for an advance e-copy of this book through NetGalley.

This book makes a perfect companion piece to Paver's previous ghost story for adults, Dark Matter. Superficially, they are very similar - both are about men (this is the Imperial 30s: yes, it's all men) pitting themselves against a harsh environment (the Arctic cold or the thin air of the high Himalyas) in a very late Empire spirit of derring-do the culmination of which was perhaps Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's successful ascent alongside the 1953 Coronation.

And both ponder how the dark, and the cold, and the essence of desperate men driven to extremes, might not let in something frightful - providing fruitful ground for real, spine tingling horror.

There are other similarities too, such as the presence of an outsider (in the case of Thin Air, the protagonist, Stephen) or relative outsider on the tightly knit group of Boys' Own types. But most of all, the note of a true horror story - compared with a mere ghost story - which is that the horror never really ends. This is encapsulated here by Tennant, survivor of an earlier expedition to 'conquer' Kanchenjunga who in early scenes is clearly haunted by something he met on that trip.

It's all done brilliantly and works well as a ghost story. Stephen is climbing with his brother Kits as part of a expedition to reach a previously unclimbed peak. Earlier expeditions have met disaster - how, and why, is slowly unravelled as the story unfolds, building tension (Paver uses a technique of studied vagueness - it's not immediately clear for example exactly what the composition of one of those expeditions was, making its members already somewhat ghostlike and blending reality with fiction). As the mountaineers approach the lower slopes, they seem to delight in ridiculing the superstitions and beliefs of the local people they describe as 'coolies' (another foreshadowing of trouble to come!)

This is one with the general attitude to 'natives'. Stephen, the expedition's doctor, speculates about what makes these people so able to bear the harsh climate and high altitude, but he discusses them in terms that might almost fit animals. The expedition leader has boots for them, but withholds these till as late as he can - and their views about the best way to proceed are pretty much discounted, indeed a number of times they're effectively compared to children. Paver is good on this attitude of late Imperial arrogance (pride coming before a fall, of course - the book is set in the mid 30s so this stuff had very little time left to run). Another way this is underscored is the military language used to describe the expedition - the mountain is assaulted, besieged, attacked.

The presence of these essential helpers also illustrates something which I hadn't really appreciated - how expeditions of two or three celebrated men reaching some peak are in reality the work of countless others, dozens or even hundreds of climbers, shuttling up and down what are described here as 'highways' i.e. surveyed routes on the mountain, piling up stores at the successive camps. It really wasn't (isn't) the heroic, solitary effort you might think - even if the 'sahibs' (as they describe themselves) do, as here, reek of high Edwardian amateurism. We're told of the disdain for oxygen bottles and 'climbing irons' and of how the white men disport themselves in their 'canvas hats, motoring helmets, cricket sweater, fishermen's jerseys, Varsity mufflers, breeches, trousers, gaiters and puttees'. There's a comedy in this, even if a dark comedy, almost as though a  bunch of PG Wodehouse's characters has wandered into the wrong book.

That only serves to highlight the tension and despair, of course, as things begin to go wrong. I won't say too much about that because I don't want to give away the story, but I think there is a sense in which what comes down on the expedition is a reflection of what they take up the mountain: Stephen's hatred of his brother, for example, perhaps stirs something up that is sleeping amidst the ice and snow, a legacy of that previous expedition Tennant was part of.

In that respect, while comparable to Dark Matter, this is I think very much the better book - in a way which I can't explain in detail, the ecology of its horror is much more complete: while lacking none of the horror of the other book, it is all more satisfying. And in exploring (no pun intended!) Imperialist attitudes and their interplay with the past and future, Paver makes some serious points about the wider story that was the Empire - perhaps even that, like any true horror story, we are still haunted by it.

Finally, if, like me, you first heard of Kanchenjunga through Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, and you would like to know more about why those kids named their unclimbable peak after it, then you'll find all you could want to know here and perhaps even gain a little admiration for those who first climbed these peaks - despite their all too visible flaws.