A dead poet’s cluttered mansion is the setting for a heady brew of magic, mystery and mushrooms
“M
an,” says one of Will Maclean’s characters on catching sight for the first time of the titular Solace House. “Gothic always tries too hard.” Here, perhaps, is a self-deprecating wink in a novel full of them – a novel that throws the (ancient, sinister, rusted taps coughing a disquieting red-brown liquid) kitchen sink at the problem of writing a good old-fashioned piece of gothic-flavoured weird fiction.
The present of the novel – though as things proceed and what David Tennant’s Doctor Who would call “timey-wimey” stuff starts to happen, the phrase gets harder to sustain – is the summer of 1993. Alex Lane stays on alone in his university’s hall of residence after the other students take off for the holidays. He’s broke. He’s lonely. He’s a bit freaked out by a sinister pale boy who seems to be the only other student left on campus. He can’t go home because of an unspecified family trauma involving what he alludes to only as The Last Day and The Annihilator. And now he’s receiving warnings that he’s about to be kicked out and charged for overstaying.
Just in time, a lifeline appears. He’s offered holiday work by the university, as one of a team of students clearing out an old asylum in a dismal, marshy area of the countryside nearby, ahead of its being turned into a new halls of residence. The asylum is called Marshlands. And next door to it stands a decrepit gothic mansion called Solace House.
