Something in the Walls, by Daisy Pearce

GREAT cover. (Look closely.) I'm having a run of "the cover is better than the book lately."


Mina, a just-qualified child psychologist, gets an unusual first patient: a teenage girl who might be a witch.

Mina was in a grief group to cope with the loss of her teenage brother, who had an immune deficiency that doomed him to die young, and died when he was fourteen. In the group, she met Sam, a journalist whose young daughter had died. Both of them hoped there was life after death, and Mina even thought she had a photo of her brother's ghost. So when Sam got assigned to cover a possible haunting-by-witch in the tiny village of Banathel, he gets Mina to come with him to rule out psychological causes.

In what will not be the last of her questionable professional moves, Mina and Sam move in with the family of Alice, the girl who might be a witch or be possessed by the ghost of a witch. Alice is sure that a witch is haunting her via the walls and the creepy fireplace in her bedroom, and that the witch allows her to see ghosts. Alice really does know a whole lot, including about dead people, that she has no way of finding out, and this has attracted a bunch of groupies who lurk outside, trying to get Alice to contact their dead loved ones. This is all complicated by the fact that her financially strained family would definitely benefit from publicity that might bring money, so they have a motive to fake the haunting.

The rest of the Banafel locals, who keep hag-stones to ward off evil, also believe in the haunting but are a lot less happy about it. "Burn the Witch" graffiti appears. In an intensely spooky scene, Sam finds his dead daughter's shoe in a fireplace. And then people who bully Alice start dropping dead...

Up to about the 75% mark, this book was very enjoyable, spooky folk horror. It had some issues but they weren't enough to spoil my enjoyment.

Issues: Mina's poor professional ethics and methods. Mina's irritating refusal to entertain the idea that anything supernatural could be happening even when there's really no other possible explanation, which doesn't match with the entire reason she came which was that she supposedly wanted to believe. Why it never occurs to anyone to move Alice out of the haunted bedroom to see if she improved. Why it never occurs to anyone to check the chimney to see if there's 1) a natural cause for the weird noises emanating from it, 2) a witch.

That sounds like a lot but the actual haunting and creepy superstitious village bits were so good. Halfway through, I ordered it off Ingram for my bookshop, planning to rec it to my folk horror customers.

Immediately upon finishing it, I rushed to Ingram to delete it from my cart.

This was a very frustrating book. Up until the last ten pages or so, it was engrossing, atmospheric folk horror - a subgenre I quite like. Then I got to the ending, which was so bad that it retroactively ruined the entire book for me. It was an absolutely unnecessary "clever" twist that made the whole book make no sense in retrospect. It also completely failed to explain or resolve what was going on with Alice and the witch, which was the main plot of the entire book!

Angry spoilers! (  Read more...  )

WHAT ABOUT ALICE AND THE FIREPLACE WITCH???

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