Starling House by Alix E Harrow

Book Review

Melody Bowles

The haunted house is a stock setting in gothic fiction, instantly familiar to readers in and outside the genre. Starling House offers a fresh take, though it takes patience to get there. Readers can expect the usual sense of foreboding to start, complete with odd noises and rearranging rooms. Local legends even tell of strange beasts coming up from a place called Underland. But hang in there – the twists and turns in the haunted house narrative are worth it.

Of course, a story about a haunted house needs someone to venture inside. We have Opal, a petty thief, looking for enough money to send her younger brother to a private school, away from their smoke-clogged home town of Eden. She makes a deal with Arthur Starling – she will clean his haunted house in exchange for the money she needs. She also steals the house’s silverware. Opal’s sections of the narrative are in first person and she is delightfully shameless in her antics to get what she wants – initially money and later, love.

The other narrator, in third person, is Arthur Starling. He is the house’s Warden and just wants to be left alone. He initially sees Opal as an unwanted stray and completely fails to scare her off. A lot of the book’s mystery surrounds his presence – what is he doing in the house? Why does he stay there? I also appreciate that he’s straight up described as “ugly” multiple times, undercutting the usual broody-but-attractive character type.

The narrative of these two characters is intercut with newspaper articles and other extracts, each adding to a patchwork of stories about Starling House. The town of Eden, with its bad luck and chequered history, makes for a perfect Southern gothic setting.

Starling House is definitely a slow-burn sort of book, but a rewarding one. I enjoyed sinking in to the setting and seeing the characters make new discoveries about themselves and each other. Amongst the suspense, there are also moments of heartwarming levity, such as when Opal gifts lonely Arthur with a stray cat, known only as “hellcat”.

Read Starling House if you’d like a sumptuous gothic tale with compelling characters and a winding narrative with plenty of twists. If you like gothic fiction, I think this one is worth picking up.