Solace House by Will Maclean evaluation – immensely enjoyable gothic horror with a psychedelic twist | Fiction

“Man,” says certainly one of Will Maclean’s characters on catching sight for the primary time of the titular Solace House. “Gothic always tries too hard.” Here, maybe, is a self-deprecating wink in a novel filled with them – a novel that throws the (historical, sinister, rusted faucets coughing a disquieting red-brown liquid) kitchen sink on the downside of writing an excellent old school piece of gothic-flavoured bizarre fiction.

The current of the novel – although as issues proceed and what David Tennant’s Doctor Who would name “timey-wimey” stuff begins to occur, the phrase will get more durable to maintain – is the summer time of 1993. Alex Lane stays on alone in his college’s corridor of residence after the opposite college students take off for the vacations. He’s broke. He’s lonely. He’s a bit freaked out by a sinister pale boy who appears to be the one different scholar left on campus. He can’t go dwelling due to an unspecified household trauma involving what he alludes to solely 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 seems. He’s provided vacation work by the college, as certainly one of a staff of scholars clearing out an previous asylum in a dismal, marshy space of the countryside close by, forward of its being was a brand new halls of residence. The asylum known as Marshlands. And subsequent door to it stands a decrepit gothic mansion known as Solace House.

The bizarre pale boy – he’s known as Adam – additionally seems to be on the clean-up crew, alongside some barely cursorily characterised early 90s scholar archetypes. Helen is a Christian; Clive is obnoxious and stoned; Ruth is a goth; Leo is new-agey, dreadlocked and eager on psychedelics; Malcolm is gorgeous and homosexual; Ella – with whom our man falls into mattress, a lot to Adam’s obvious rage – is red-haired and bewitching. Joints are smoked; low cost pink wine and spag bol dispatched; pretentious banter exchanged.

Marshlands is soiled and cluttered, however it’s when the clean-up crew attain Solace House itself that the enjoyable actually begins. This huge house, we’re informed, was the abode of 1 Edwin Flayne, who died on the age of 102 having barely left the home in many years. As properly as being a recluse, he was – within the catchphrase that college students in 1993 may attain for – madder than Mad Jack McMad, winner of final 12 months’s Mr Madman competitors.

He was additionally a hoarder. Solace House’s dingy floor ground is stacked ground to ceiling with previous newspapers and knackered knick-knacks. Tunnels barely broad sufficient for one scholar to navigate side-on wind by means of the detritus. A mysterious phone rings unanswered, every now and then, someplace deep within the inaccessible inside. Also, surer signal of insanity: Flayne was a poet. His blithering epic in horrible quatrains – all archaisms, portentous summary nouns and inverted ft – is reproduced two quatrains at a time as epigraphs to the chapters of the novel.

O, uncountable span I now surpass,
Incessant gray hours, turgid.
Noble alternative wasted. Gone, alas!
In nullity limitless abandoned.

Does Solace House stand at a “thin place” the place the emanations of worlds past our personal seep by means of into our actuality? It does. Was Edwin Flayne pursuing, by means of demented maths and darkish magic, mysteries that man was not meant to know? He was. Was Flayne’s beloved mom a redhead known as Ella? Uh huh. Do each Adam and Alex’s full names, set as acrostics, spell out the title of Flayne’s father’s title Abel? They do. Are there a hedge maze and an historical cavern? There are. Does everybody’s buy on even the mundane particulars of actuality begin to get a bit of hinky? It does. Is everybody going to finish up taking a shit ton of magic mushrooms? Oh sure.

Perhaps the strongest comparator to Solace House isn’t a novel, however the TV franchise True Detective; but behind that stand Arthur Machen, Charles Williams and HP Lovecraft. Other flavours the reader will catch may be The Secret History and House of Leaves (it’s no House of Leaves – however then, what’s?). Hell, there’s even a whiff of The Children of Green Knowe in there. And it shares a bit of of its occult territory with Francis Spufford’s latest Nonesuch. So, it’s an ideal hotchpotch of all that great things, working like mad to entertain and spook the reader. The 500-odd pages whip by.

If you needed to mark it down, you’d say that – like the home – it’s a bit overstuffed, and that Maclean scrabbles a bit when he’s attempting to gesture on the ineffable mind-mangling realms past time, house and puny human comprehension. But, like, that’s barely the character of these realms. Gothic, man. It tries too arduous. It has to. If these items is your jam, you’ll find it irresistible. And – chapeau! – there’s a intelligent and satisfying twist in the direction of the top that even makes some sense of that horrible poetry.