The Grief House

Since she was a child, Blue had been paraded around by her over-zealous mother, to read tarot cards at public events. Blue was home-schooled, and had only one good relationship with a father figure. She had no friends of her own age, and there was very little money in the family coffers to support and feed them. The was not a healthy upbringing and it was bound to go horribly wrong at some stage. It did.

Blue’s story unfolds throughout this fabulously engrossing book, and what came before her arrival at the recovery home, Hope Marsh House, is every bit as unnerving as what happens in the house itself. As I got to know what she is capable of, I understood more of the whys and wherefores of her childhood and growing years. Time and again, I was tripped into comprehension, and time and again, it was not what I thought.

The equally brilliantly engrossing story behind the wellness centre got into my head, helped by the thunderous weather conditions. From Frankenstein to Macbeth, lashings of rain smacking into windows, high winds slamming doors and flooded rivers and creaking woods have shivered spines and kept heads ducking below the bedclothes. It certainly does here too. The remote house and its secrets, together with the people who run it and live there, provide the perfect backdrop for a novel about twisted darkness – that of humans, other-worldliness, and the places they inhabit.