No, I don’t know how it’s pronounced either…
Pre-order the book direct from Dark Matter Ink here
Synopsis
It’s midnight and in the midst of an ice storm when Claudia Dance boards the bright yellow bus to Lacelean Street, a destination she has never heard of. She has no coat, no luggage, and no clue as to why she left home. In fact, she has no memory of her past whatsoever, and yet she feels compelled to make the trip. She will come to realize that salvation lies within the red-brick house at the end of Lacelean Street, a salvation granted by the strange power that dwells within. Sanity will be questioned, limits tested, and answers revealed… But at what price?
Review
The books of Welsh horror supremo Catherine McCarthy never assail you with outright terror; they build and build a sense of unease and dread, normally exploding in grand finales of a sinister and horrific nature. Last year she published two books like this; one uniquely surreal-gothic (A Moonlit Path of Madness) and one a tremendous mix of folk and cosmic horror (Mosaic).
But, as anyone who’s read her collection of short stories Mists and Megaliths knows (or indeed her most recent modern-day fairy-tale The Wolf and the Favour), she is capable of switching between styles like a decathlete with a record to break, and with The House on Lacelean street, she has switched tack again. This is not so much a scary book (despite that ominously spooky front cover) as it is a haunted, emotionally charged puzzle box that will keep you obsessively glued to the page seeking answers.
It’s also not an easy book to review, as honestly the less you know going in the better. This is great news for curbing my tendency to drivel on like an overflowing drainpipe of words, less great for my ability to describe the curious goings on in the titular house. All I’m comfortable saying is that three amnesiac people get off a mysterious bus and arrive at a mysterious house… which has a bunch of mysterious stuff in store for them. Trust me, you don’t want to know any more. In an age where we all crave instant gratification (that statement sponsored by aging Millennials) for once just let yourself go in clueless.
This is one of those books that has the surreal vibe of a location that feels at once real and yet supernatural; a place you can’t escape from, where nothing is as it seems. In that sense it reminded me of that John Cusack horror film Identity, where the amnesiacs are trapped in a motel as the truth slowly outs itself as they get killed one by one. But again, this book is not about murder or scares; not to say it isn’t sinister and unsettling at times – there are some elements of psychological horror here, and the pain of the central characters is examined in some stark, distressing scenes – but it is about the characters and their journey first and foremost, and it’s here that McCarthy’s gift for voice and humanity comes through as we slowly find out more about these mysterious figures and why they might be at Lacelean Street.
Of course there is still McCarthy’s vivid imagery and symbolism around; sometimes leaning into the grim and bloody and macabre, and sometimes leaning into the symbolic: McCarthy has never met an animal or celestial object she couldn’t turn into a metaphor and the fact that the abstract symbolism always feels intriguing and poetic rather than frustrating is another sign of her gifts as a writer. There is a hint of the cosmic; a hint of Gods and mythology. A hint of greater forces at work. And at times there is almost a Lewis Carroll-esque sense of proceedings.
Ultimately, I’m sorry I can’t say more, but I’m also not in a way sorry at all. What I will say is that I had no idea where this was going, and whether or not you get all the answers at the end, I suspect you will be as compelled as I was to get there, and then spend some time thinking about what it all means. This is a book that will hit you in the gut when you least expect it; swapping outright terror for the slow creep of humanity and meaning and family and second chances has turned out to be a brilliant twist in the ever unpredictable McCarthy oeuvre. She continues to be a star of British horror.
Leave a Reply