REVIEW: The Cold House by A.G. Slatter
I love A.G. Slatter’s writing. She is one of those authors who, for me, could rewrite a phone book, and I’d probably eagerly jump in and expect to enjoy it. However, Slatter’s latest offering is the horror novella The Cold House. I love Slatter, but I am a wimp at horror. I’m good with gothic horror, but have quite a low threshold for body horror or gore. The cover of The Cold House, with its burning corn doll and rusty scissors, didn’t fill me with warm fuzzy feelings. But I dove in (with the lights on) for this story that kicked me in the gut, but I still loved.
“You know how Emily Dickinson said hope is the thing with feathers? Well, grief is the thing with claws. It takes a while, and some people don’t survive it.”
In The Cold House, we meet Everly. Dr. Everly Bainbridge. A writer with a dark past, whose life is left shattered after the sudden and violent deaths of her husband and daughter. After the accident that rearranges Everly’s world, she learns that, as well as being dead, her husband was a liar. He had a life she knew nothing about; now she is a very rich widow. To escape the echoes of her former life, Everly retreats to a lonely house in the countryside. There may not be any memories hiding in those walls, but the house is so frigid. One night, Everly wakes up one step away from plummeting down into the well in the cold, cold cellar, and her dead daughter’s voice is ringing in her ears.
Even as someone who is much more of a fantasy fan than a horror fan, The Cold House is a read I really enjoyed. Slatter uses a contemporary setting, so initially, the novella reads a little like a thriller. I had a very physical reaction to certain parts – that feeling when the hairs on your arms stand up or your stomach drops. That might be because I’m a parent, but oh boy, did I feel Everly’s grief. There were times as I was reading where I thought that either this could be a supernatural tweak or Everly could be psychotic from the loss. Both would have made sense to me, given how great her grief was. As a protagonist, Everly is entirely compelling, and how she deals with this catastrophic loss carries The Cold House.
Slatter weaves the supernatural elements of The Cold House into the very human theme of bereavement. Everly’s guilt as she works her way through her loss is threaded with her anger as she discovers the extent of her husband’s other life and her questioning of what is happening to her in this strange old house.
For a shorter read (just over 150 pages), Slatter held my attention well, and The Cold House still has the same appeal for me as her other works, style-wise. My initial wariness was unfounded because this was a modern horror novella, not a part of her Sourdough Universe that I love so much. There are dark things at work here. Slatter uses many of the tools of a gothic or folk horror tale, but any body horror or gore did not exceed my limits.
If you’re after a shorter unsettling read that will grab you and drag you through its delicious twists and turns, then The Cold House would be one for you. Thank you very much to A.G. Slatter and our friends at Titan Books for sending us an advanced reader copy.
Read The Cold House by A.G. Slatter
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