Cuechick read and liked Taueret's review of The Little Stranger:

"nice atmospheric page-turner, with a satisfying if mysterious ending.

I upgraded this to 4 stars after thinking about it a bit. below are some comments I made in an email discussion about the book. VERY SPOILER HEAVY. You've been warned...more nice atmospheric page-turner, with a satisfying if mysterious ending.

I upgraded this to 4 stars after thinking about it a bit. below are some comments I made in an email discussion about the book. VERY SPOILER HEAVY. You've been warned!

if anyone has any comments I'd enjoy reading your thoughts, as there are quite a few ways to interpret this book.







ok






you sure?






here we go





I enjoyed the book. It fell initially into a category that I consider "easy reading"- fun, writing and editing competent enough that it doesn't distract me from the story, absorbing, and best of all with an ending that both made sense (whichever spin one chooses to put on the end) and doesn't enrage me somehow (it's easy to do, I am a prickly prickly reader). The more I think about it though, the more I admire this book!

My guess about the 'ghost'? I think we are meant to consider (listed in no particular order):
1) Susan
2) Betty (as a poltergeist manifestor)
3) Mrs Faraday ( I kept expecting her to have had something to do as a servant with the dead Susan, and her guilt kept her walking the halls, and somehow drew her son towards his involvement with the family)
5) maybe Roderick... somehow he doesn't fit my "profile" for a poltergeist focus- but he would be Dr Faraday's primary rival in his designs on Hundreds.
4) Dr Faraday (as a thought-form manifestor, and possibly at the end as an actual hands-on murderer)
6) Hundreds itself? Maybe the house itself a passive echo chamber of past emotions; maybe sentient and scheming, trying to replace the incompetent Roderick with a master capable of saving its halls?

My personal feeling is that Dr Faraday becomes enthralled and more or less enslaved by the house (or an 'entity' that inhabits Hundreds; or some crazy delusion of his own), and whoever is responsible for the poltergeist activity, it is he who murders Caroline. I'm certain of it! He was on the property that night, asleep and dreaming of approaching the house, only to enter blackness when he arrives. Either he did it via thought form, or phantasm, as they refer to them in the book, or literally with his own hands. Thinking about it, all the nutty things that happened took place when he wasn't present physically, didn't they...

The author was quite clever with language, subtly changing the narrator from his original personality to a very different one by the end of the book. The shift was obvious enough that it raised my suspicions of the narrator quite early on. Anyone else? He was really scary by the end of the book, when he was rushing around buying wedding dresses and harrassing the Ayers family lawyer! Maybe he was crazy all along, the theft of the plaster acorn at the beginning of the story eventually bearing fruit in the destruction of the family in the Big House?

I liked the Hundreds estate as a metaphor for the gentry, the council estate finally breaching the walls. I liked the image of the doctor returning to sweep and tend the empty halls of the abandoned house.
This is one of those books that has way more going for it than I noticed at first read.

and...


I was just thinking that the stand-out thing about this book for me is probably the fact that the pitter patter of dropping unpaired shoes in a plot usually makes me wild- somehow I feel like it is cheating, lazy. _The Little Stranger_ has many of these, but it works as a feature this time, it's skilfully and thoughtfully done.

Somewhere in your earlier discussion, someone commented on it seeming incongruous that Caroline was so uninterested in Faraday, ah here it is: "BTW, did anyone else find Caroline's attitude towards Faraday odd? Was it b/c she was too wrapped up in her brother? Or was this simply run-of-the-mill and frank snobbery?" - I felt like she genuinely liked him in say the first half of the book, when there was no interest on his part, and she was comfortable being her eccentric, capable self. Around the time he suddenly started thinking of her as a potential mate, she changed too (although since we only see her through Faraday's reporting, perhaps not), and it seemed to me like she was 'trying on' the role of the girlfriend, from the dance onwards.

I guess the war changed everything- giving women like Caroline a taste of life outside the park of traditional roles; damaging Roderick to the point where he was unable to cope with the pressures of the role he was born to step up to; seeding the birth of the middle class as we know it today and the decline of the gentry, making the mother herself a ghost from a past time...

As long as Roderick was fit to assume his role as master of the estate, and producer of an heir, Caroline was free to be Caroline. His decline effectively imprisoned her in the role she toys with assuming in her flirtation with Faraday.(less) "