Forrest’s Reviews > The House of Silence > Status Update

Okay, some straight up folk horror going on here. But with a touch of . . . elegant brutality?

Nightmare or horrific vision of reality? Time travel or drunken fancy? Difficult to tell. All is obfuscated, but with tiny cracks through which one might vaguely sense a truth. Perhaps.

The switch from past to present tense in the last paragraph of pg 213 might have been clumsy and un-natural, except Brantley does the dance with precision, pulling the reader into the moment where another writer might have ejected them from the narrative with this bold move.

While I feel like I've overused the term "folk horror" in many of my recent reviews, the rural . . . well, "folk" in this novel are giving me the heebie jeebies. But there's a more gothic element to this and what appears, so far, to be a strong strain of supernatural, perhaps even cosmic horror.

I have a strange fondness for stories where one is quite unsure of who is a friend and who is an enemy, especially in the most intimate (and I'm not talking in a primarily sexual sense here) relations. That vulnerability seems to allow an opening up of emotions between the reader and the protagonist. Throw in the subtle breaking of the fourth wall, and you have a fully immersive, vested story. This is where I am now.

Ashley's trust in others is eroding at this point. Either his social safety net is eroding or others are beginning to reveal themselves for what they truly are. Or perhaps his mind, infected by horrific visions, is becoming darkened, occluding his vision of the good in people. Maybe it's none of these things. In any case, Brantley paints in chiarascuro wonderfully.

I was beginning to wonder if this was a horror book at all. Then the protagonist, Ashley, was met by a creepy young girl saying creepy things she could not possibly know, whose reflection in water showed not as her, but as Ashley's first love from his childhood . . . at his father's funeral. Okay, horror firmly established. Got it.

Is there such a thing as Diablos ex machina? Because Loren's appearance in the old church Ashley visits might be it.

Well, there's a bit of an emotional wallop. Ouch!

My gosh, the timing, the cadences of the first chapter are astounding. I'm like a readerly dog on a leash: where Avalon Brantley pulls, I follow. Already the story is multi-valent, perhaps polysemic (I've yet to confirm this), like there are a dozen stories layered into this first chapter alone. I'm being plunged into The House of Silence.