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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

What’s haunting these houses?

22/6/2016

4 Comments

 
It’s almost a year until my second novel, Underneath, is published. As it starts with looking around a house, I had it in mind when I posted my guest prompt over at the Carrot Ranch recently. What I didn’t realise at the time was that this would herald a theme cutting across much of my reading and reviews, from Nolan’s work on a building site in Journeyman, to an updated Wildfell in The Woman Who Ran, to the isolated manor house in The Sacred Combe, a large house in Nigeria in This House is not For Sale, a farmhouse in upstate New York which has been bought on the cheap in All Things Cease to Appear and an entire street in Prosperity Drive. Now I’m adding to that list with a novel about a former show house on an unfinished Irish housing estate from which, one by one, all four members of a family disappear and another about the strange children who come to live in an isolated mansion.

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Helen, her twin sister Martina, her partner Paul and their unnamed daughter return to Ireland and rent a property on a building site, where work has stopped, at the beginning of a long hot summer. The only other occupied house becomes empty when the husband dies and the wife moves in with her daughter. Then the night watchman, whom Martina used to visit in his caravan, is withdrawn and the site owner, who’s been promising new neighbours for weeks, stops visiting. When Helen disappears, her photo is posted in shop windows, but the police have no leads. Martina stops work to sunbathe with her twelve-year-old niece and collect bottled water from the supermarket when the supply to the house is cut off. When Martina also vanishes, Paul and his daughter sleep at night in the stifling attic, afraid of the mysterious noises they hear across the site.

Then the daughter, who’s taken her mother’s name, comes banging on the door of the local priest, saying her father has gone. The police duly arrive to investigate, but leave young Helen at the priest’s house over the weekend. When she can’t be found, the finger of suspicion, with a nod to the events portrayed in A History of Loneliness, understandably falls on him.

Conor O’Callaghan’s debut novel is disturbing in the way that a nightmare is disturbing: there’s a veritable air of menace but, without a coherent narrative, impossible to explain and so fades away on exposure to the real world. Thanks to Transworld for my review copy.

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Grossly disfigured in late adolescence (reminding me of Sean in Wolf in White Van), Morgan rarely leaves the large country house built and furnished by his exiled grandfather. One day, Engel, his housekeeper, discovers a baby left on the steps by the back door. Soon more children arrive, more than he can count, their presence in the house both a source of joy (especially as they show no fear of his grotesque appearance) and vaguely unsettling. What makes them at times so typically childlike, at others fiercely mature? Where do they go when the house descends into an eerie quietness? From where does David, the eldest, acquire his evident authority and is Morgan right to trust his advice?

Soon the local physician Dr Crane takes up residence in the house, the nearest to a friend Morgan has ever had. Like Samuel Browne, the volunteer archivist in The Sacred Combe, the doctor becomes absorbed in exploring the mansion’s library, and its attics too. The children also, once they learn to read and write, are on a quest to uncover the secrets the building holds.

An atmospheric and distorted fairytale, this is another novel where I struggled to find the meaning under the surface. I thought perhaps the house might be a representation of Morgan’s psyche, and the numerous children split-off fragments of his unacknowledged and darker desires (p99):

He imagined himself the dirty secret at the heart of the world, the overlooked madwoman raving in the attic of a house that occupied everything there was, each brick and pane and board, the wondering prince in the hair-filled mask of iron he had dreamt of as a boy and never been able to forget.


This reading seems supported by the discovery of two extremely lifelike wax models: one of a heavily pregnant woman; the other man’s head with removable scalp and skull through which one might examine the human brain.

But the focus turns to the question of the source of Morgan’s wealth and the exact business of the family factory now run by a sister he never sees. The Children’s Home becomes a story of human cruelty, of the corruption of innocence in pursuit of profit, evoking the evil of the Holocaust. As the children say, in their first writing exercise (p106):

I AM ONLY A CHILD BUT ALREADY I HAVE UNDERSTOOD THE WICKEDNESS OF THE WORLD.


A disturbing and thought-provoking novel, and short enough to take a risk on if you’re not sure you’d like it. Thanks to Aardvark Bureau for my review copy.
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
4 Comments
Norah Colvin link
23/6/2016 07:28:47 am

Hi Anne,
I always enjoy reading your reviews and the insight you give into the books. Both these novels sound rather disturbing. I don't think I'd chance either one. I'm grateful you alerted me to them.

Reply
Annecdotist
24/6/2016 05:01:47 pm

Thanks, Norah, I thought you might pass on these, but I'm looking forward to your feedback on today's review as there's a lot about early childhood
http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/1/post/2016/06/-neutral-to-neutered-the-gustav-sonata-by-rose-tremain.html

Reply
Charli Mills link
25/6/2016 08:02:33 pm

Place can be setting or a character, and hybrids in between. It definitely sounds as if both authors have used place to create eerie or sinister tones to support their unfolding stories. This makes me wonder about your house in Underneath. Did you feel like you had choices? Such as, creating the house to be normal, thus contrasting with the characters abnormal quest or creating the house to be a reflection of the character's psyche? I'm wondering if you approached the writing with an idea in mind or if the house became something of its own through your process.

Reply
Annecdotist
27/6/2016 10:56:42 am

Extremely interesting question, Charli, which I hadn’t thought much about. Steve’s house in Underneath is, to my mind, fairly ordinary, although I’ve personally never lived in a house with a cellar. For him, it’s a relationship breakdown that makes the house seem both menacing and an opportunity to gain control. Might be a question to come back to when my novel is out there to be read!

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