The House Of Lost Souls

I hope for Cottam's sake that this haunted house novel didn't take long to produce, since it reads as a half-formed premise converted into a novel over a weekend, an approaching deadline leaving no time for editing or re-writes.

Summary: The novel introduces a protagonist, Nick Mason, an ex-soldier, using his military training to spy on his sister as she attends a funeral, for no reason that is apparent. He is then almost immediately abandoned for the second protagonist, Paul Seaton,

I hope for Cottam's sake that this haunted house novel didn't take long to produce, since it reads as a half-formed premise converted into a novel over a weekend, an approaching deadline leaving no time for editing or re-writes.

Summary: The novel introduces a protagonist, Nick Mason, an ex-soldier, using his military training to spy on his sister as she attends a funeral, for no reason that is apparent. He is then almost immediately abandoned for the second protagonist, Paul Seaton, whose defining characteristic is being Irish. We know he is Irish because every other character refers to it on every individual occasion on which they meet him. Also, he randomly uses a selection of cod-Irish phrases, which his companion of the moment never fails to react to with bemusement and confusion.

The bulk of the novel consists of a backstory stretched across more pages than it deserves and randomly parcelled out to the reader using such well-worn techniques as old diaries discovered at opportune moments and the appearance of decrepit old friends and relations of the key characters of the past, who recall just enough information to be sinister, but not sufficient to explain clearly what's happening. All these characters and long-lost diaries are written in exactly the same style, lacking almost any character-distinction whatsoever. We do however learn the motivation of our two protagonists: Seaton learnt of the supposedly evil Fischer House whilst researching the life of long-dead photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare, an idealised glamorous flapper, in order to allow his girlfriend, an even more idealised gorgeous fashion student, to complete her degree paper on said dead photographer. This girlfriend then left him, apparently because he was spending too much time helping her cheat at her degree. Meanwhile Paul Mason is involved in order to help his sister, glimpsed at a distance in the first chapter and thereafter absent, who was exposed to the house during a rather unlikely field-trip for her own degree course and immediately and inconveniently commenced to run mad. Several other students and their professor also visited the house and lost their minds, but they are quickly relegated to collateral damage and removed from the story. None of these events seem to make particular sense, and no part of what is described obviously leads to the two characters’ assumption that they are destined to destroy the evil the house contains via some gung-ho stupidity and essentially no plan whatsoever. None-the-less, this is indeed the conclusion of the book, and a very weak conclusion at that.

Basically, a trite Satanist plot featuring two macho cipher characters performing a series of random actions in order to save a trio of female plot-devices from the machinations of some famous occultists from history, thrown in to the mix in the hope that some of their supposed glamour will rub off on the text. It doesn’t. Nor does it distract from the fact that there is no underlying logic to most of the characters’ actions beyond the need to further the story. There is no real reason for any of them to visit the house. There is no justification for Seaton and Mason’s belief that they can destroy the evil. The conclusion is reached through no apparent pattern or rationality and is thus devoid of meaning; plus, it is dull, anticlimactic and oddly places a heavy emphasis on a boxer who has had nothing to do with the novel up to this point.

In conclusion, I would ask that if Cottam indeed has neither the time nor the inclination to write horror stories, as evinced by this text, that he avoid any financial temptations and refrain from producing them regardless of ability and temperament, thus avoiding wasting any more hours of my life.