Alan Kelly weighs in on a pair of recent releases.
HOUSE OF SMALL SHADOWS
Adam Nevill
Macmillan
Riffing on Peter Weir’s 1975 mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock and blending elements of hag horror with the killer-doll trope, Adam Nevill’s fourth novel, House of Small Shadows, is a far more self-contained and playful story than the author’s previous efforts, while still managing to maintain his signature grim tone throughout.
With her professional profile sullied following a violent incident in London, auctioneer Catherine Howard is exiled to the sticks and only too happy to take on a lucrative new commission. Catherine is sent by her new boss to sift through the Red House, the repository of celebrated post-war taxidermist and puppeteer MH Mason, and ascertain the “arts” value of the estate. Aided by Mason’s niece, a caustic crone named Edith – think Fanny Cradock by way of Salem’s Lot’s Richard Straker – Catherine is drawn into a surreal, hellish world when she meets the house’s unsavoury occupants and uncovers a connection to her own past.
A frustrating hallmark of the haunted-house subgenre is that the story sometimes unfolds at a glacial pace – a trap Nevill sidesteps with ease thanks to a foot-to-the-pedal narrative drive, some legitimate frights and well-constructed settings, including a puppet nursery and the Red House itself. Nevill’s foray into folk horror is a nail-biting success.
THE RETURNED
Jason Mott
Harlequin MIRA
Despite sharing a title, an identical premise and the character-driven eeriness of Fabrice Gobert’s excellent French supernatural drama Les Revenants, Jason Mott’s The Returned offers enough originality and scares to satisfy readers in a debut from an author who, like George Romero, understands that horror and monsters cannot exist outside a socio-political context.
The Returned, which is currently being adapted for television by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and ABC, posits a world where the dead return to life. It’s a globe-spanning story rooted in a personal narrative; the novel centres on elderly couple Harold and Lucille, the return of their eight-year-old son Jacob, who drowned decades earlier, and the militaristic segregation of “the Returned” in their small Southern town.
The reader enters the story in the aftermath of this phenomenon and although Jacob’s return is initially met with distrust and fear from his parents, they gradually realise he is the same boy who perished years earlier. When the US military commandeers a local school to contain the overflow of the Returned and violence erupts between the townsfolk and the soldiers, Harold and Lucille become separated. With Harold and Jacob confined in the army’s makeshift prison, Lucille must single-handedly protect a family of returnees, not only from the trigger-happy soldiers, but from the rest of her community as well.
The novel has shades of Stephen King: the small-town setting, decent people threatened by a not-easily- identified evil, an intimate story intercut with a sweeping epic, magic realism. Readers who enjoy the blood-free, slow-burning work of Paulo Coelho will find a lot to enjoy in this Southern Gothic fable.
Alan Kelly
