“You don’t belong here. None of you do. None but us….”
1940. Pamela Courtney is evacuated to Chanterlands – the home of her aunts: Jilly, the eccentric one, who dreams of her days as a star of the silver screen, and Bunny, the pragmatic one.
But Chanterlands is home to more than just the living. There’s the spectral lonely boy whose room Pamela sleeps in and, in the long-neglected attic, she discovers a sinister secret of this once-great house. But greater danger awaits Pamela during that summer long ago when war raged all over Europe and the safety her mother had wished for her took a dark and fatal turn.
Dark bleatings, my ghosty tribe. It’s a gothic novel on the review chopping block today, though thankfully, not much chopping is happening from this reviewer.
Oh, my heart…poor Pamela! Our main character is a kid that has to be sent to the safety of living with her two aunts (who, minus the magic, reminded me of the Spellmans). It’s WW2 and bombs are falling so staying with her parents isn’t an option until things return to normal. The thing is, she doesn’t know her aunts very well, nor the house, which is immediately unsettling. Something within it feels unwelcoming, maybe hostile. One aunt is a strict, no nonsense kind of lady, devoid of superstition. The other likes to reminisce about her acting career, better times, and appears to talk to herself…or perhaps just people that others can’t see. We get a very slow build of atmosphere and increasingly physical instances that no one will listen to Pamela about, before the story culminates in quite an emotional blaze.
My only criticism of this novel is that I found it a bit slow in the middle, but this is a personal beef I have with all ghosty books and it’s the reason I don’t gravitate towards them too often. However, the pacing never made me want to put it down. Pamela was a perfect protagonist and was easy to empathise with and fear for. Since we see the story through her eyes and she’s a child, it really added to the scariness of what she was experiencing. That sense of frustration of having to hold back when explaining what had scared her also gripped me – her fears are continuously dismissed and so she has to start finding ways to relate incidents without sounding like she was making things up or imagining them.
I’ve read this author’s work before so I was excited to see how she’d wrap it up. My favourite thing about her work is that she spends most of her haunting novels burying us in atmosphere, tension, and subtlety, put doesn’t hold back in her endings, often surprising me with how far she’s willing to go in service of the story she’s telling. This book did not disappoint in that regard.
This is my favourite of Catherine’s works so far, and I can happily recommend it to fans of spooks, ghosts, and spectres. It’s due for UK release on 18th August. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
Leave a comment