Peter Benson
Alma Books
ISBN: 978-1-84688-206-7
I hesitate to describe this novel as “gothic”, as that is rather a cliché in reviews, but this is a story about a rare book valuer who is called upon to visit a remote estate to study the late Lord Malcolm Buff-Orpington‘s collection , whose cab driver abandons him before the journey’s end, who is assailed by the locals with dark warnings about the Lord, meets the mysterious Professor Hunt, becoming aware of his sister (Isabel), when he hears her cries of pain from somewhere back in the house, and even before setting out has this to say:
“So this is my house at the edge of the marshes with its roof, doors and chairs, and there go a flock of geese, and this is my house too. It is like everyone’s other house, a place where secrets, promises, dreams and terrors are kept. Mine is like this.”
-so I feel quite at ease in calling this gothic. It wanders close to becoming a pastiche of a Victorian novel, but the occasional twentieth-century phrase drags it back to the present day; not entirely convincingly. And the protagonist, with the reassuringly ‘normal’ name of David Morris, survives to see it through, despite the warnings.
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