A rare and simple thing, today, dear listener, as we post an actual book review. Not a hoax. Not a rambling offshoot into weird stuff by Yours Truly, but an honest-to-gods piece on a new and unsettling novel – We Wait from Megan Taylor – by our regular guest reviewer Dave Brzeski (Spoiler: He really likes it).
“A novel well worth reading; in fact it genuinely rewards re-reading. Quite simply this is the best modern Gothic… the best haunted house story I’ve read in an awful long time.”
We Wait comes from Megan Taylor, the author of novels How We Were Lost, The Dawning and The Lives of Ghosts, and a short story collection, The Woman Under the Ground.
As it happens, Dave and I also had the pleasure of publishing Megan’s excellent short story ‘Exposing the Dead’ in Occult Detective Magazine #5 (then called Occult Detective Quarterly).
WE WAIT by Megan Taylor
Eyrie Press, paperback and Kindle
Review by Dave Brzeski
I’ve seen comments from more than one reviewer who compared this novel to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s immediately obvious that they weren’t referring to the plot. There’s no group of characters actively investigating a haunted house here. I could also see some thematic similarities to Stephen King’s The Shining, but that would be equally misleading. This is very much its own book.
We Wait opens with an introductory passage in italics, which purports to be the whispering spirits of Greywater House, the country estate of Maddie’s family. There are several other such passages here and there as the story progresses, but despite this, the supernatural element here is handled with great subtlety, which benefits the book immeasurably.
Maddie is brought to stay with her Aunt Natalie at Greywater House, under a cloud due to events which occurred at her boarding school. She has been allowed to bring along her best friend, Ellie, who looks on it as a great adventure.
Things soon start to turn sour, even before they reach the house, as Ellie sees something that almost causes their car to crash – but there is apparently nothing there. The tone of the book from here on is tense and somewhat bleak, and it gets progressively more so. The skill with which Megan Taylor introduces all the players while hinting at their many secrets is quite extraordinary.
The aged, bedridden relative, confined to a room at the top of the house is a classic Gothic horror trope, but I’ve rarely seen it handled in such a skilled, and very unsettling manner as it is here. Aunt Natalie’s bedridden mother, who we rarely see, or hear from – in fact she doesn’t get a single line of dialogue, nor do we find out her name (Marcia) until fairly well into the book – absolutely creeped me out. The very thought of entering that room is instilled with a palpable feeling of dread.
Ellie isn’t only there to support her friend… she is also in dire need of a break. Her own mother is dying of cancer, which really doesn’t help her delicate emotional state. Naturally, whatever supernatural influence pervades the house finds in Ellie a prime target.
I need to make a confession here – I read this a while back, then attempted to write a review. I found it very difficult to encapsulate what I felt, so I abandoned it for a couple of months. Then I approached the book again, having decided to make notes as I went along this time. The trouble is, this is one of those books you want people to have read already, so you can discuss it without risk of spoilers, compare how you interpreted various events etc.
There’s so much I’d like to say about just the first part of this novel, but I find myself severely hampered by that sticky problem of spoilers. It is impossible, however, to not mention one aspect of the girls’ relationship, as it’s a central theme to the book. Let me just say that Aunt Natalie has her own reasons for disapproving, and the reaction of Maddie’s father, Hugo, when he returns at the end of the first part, is not pleasant.
Part Two, set thirty years earlier, concerns Natalie’s story when she was close to the same age as Maddie and Ellie, and as the secrets of her family are gradually revealed, we begin to see parallels. It’s a story of bigotry, jealousy and dark deeds, which the house has absorbed, and these echoes of the past are in danger of being repeated.
One of the more obvious such parallels is the scenario of another girl and her school friend at Greywater House. This time, it’s Natalie, and her friend Jessica who are more or less in the same situation as Maddie and Ellie in the first part. This time we also have a younger Hugo, and their harridan of a mother.
The girl, Jessica, is the daughter of Marcia’s brother-in-law from his first marriage, which means she’s not even a blood relative. Marcia’s sister has basically dumped her stepdaughter on Marcia. Here, it’s the nature of Natalie and Jessica’s relationship that angers Marcia, and there’s no getting away from the fact that she is a bigot. She plots to separate the girls by having her rake of a son seduce Jessica. It becomes apparent over time that this is a very complex novel. It’s not just about bigotry over the girls’ sexuality, nor is it about the other dark secrets the characters are keeping hidden or the house’s malign influence. Everything feeds off of everything else.
In the third and final part, we come back to the present, and things rapidly come to a head. It’s not an easy read, if I’m honest. There’s a level of despair that becomes almost overwhelming. Don’t be discouraged by that, though. This is a complex novel well worth reading; in fact it genuinely rewards re-reading. Quite simply this is the best modern Gothic… the best haunted house story I’ve read in an awful long time. I’d go as far as to say it’s possibly one of the best, period.
More about Megan Taylor’s work at:
And We Wait is available now:
Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives I & II
Edited by John Linwood Grant
