There’s always room for another creepy old house story. I don’t particularly want to live in one, but I sure love reading about them. There’s another Kate Collins out there writing cozy mysteries with delightful titles such as “Dearly Depotted” and “Sleeping With Anenome” and, note to self, I need to check out this Flower Shop Mystery series. However, this is not THAT Kate Collins, as there’s nothing fluffy about A Good House for Children. This is the debut novel of Ms. Collins, an Irish-born writer now living and working in England.

Synopsis

The novel alternates between two women in two different timelines. In 2017, Orla is a wife and mother whose artistic aspirations have taken a backseat since she succumbed to the obligations of motherhood. Always buckling under the pretentious gaslighting of her jackass husband, Nick, Orla agrees to move their growing family out to “The Reeve,” a spooky crumbling mansion in Dorset. Once there, he proceeds to scamper out to God knows where for the entire week only to return long enough on the weekend to judge his wife mercilessly from his cushy spot as a family spectator. (Can you tell I didn’t like Nick?) In 1976, we get the second thread from the perspective of Lydia, a live-in nanny for a wealthy family trying to overcome the devastating loss of the father by moving out to the seclusion of The Reeve. The loss of her husband has caused the mother, Sara, to become little more than a ghost flickering through her children’s lives as she buckles under the depression that’s overtaken. Sara’s voluntary isolation becomes Lydia’s forced isolation. Both women, Orla and Lydia, begin to experience unsettling and potentially dangerous events that lead them to believe the house is more than just a house. The problem? No one else believes them.

Review

Kate Collins has a gift for building upon the dark and foreboding atmosphere in a way that fully sucks us in and keeps us reading. But she also does something a bit deeper with her characters. There’s an undercutting feminist narrative surrounding these two women and the power they lack in their human relationships. More often than not, their wants and desires are stripped from them, they are left isolated and ignored, and they are made to feel silly for their fanciful delusions. Almost immediately, my impression was that this novel is very much a mashup of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Frankly, it works very well and is completely infuriating. Collins was definitely successful in eliciting the emotions she was mining for in this creation. The house is fascinating and lovely in a grotesque and frightening way. Someone who can’t make the house a character shouldn’t be writing stories about haunted houses. Thankfully, Collins understood the assignment and crafted a brilliantly terrifying presence, a presence that grows increasingly closer and larger throughout the novel, and the walls close in more and more, little by little, until there’s nowhere else to go.

Was everything perfect? Not at all. I would have liked a little more follow-up into surviving characters, perhaps even a convergence of the two timelines at some point. There were some loose ends left opened, but this is merely a personal preference. Collins said what she needed to say, and some things are left up to us to decide. While it’s necessary to the story for both Orla and Lydia to be lacking in a bit of conviction, this becomes a very frustrating aspect of the story. It’s difficult to see them both not stand up for themselves when it feels so necessary for them to muster some inner strength. What Collins presents is realistic, sadly. It’s just really, really depressing.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and I’m really looking forward to the material Collins will put out in the future. She’s definitely a welcome new voice in the realm of modern Gothic horror.

Published July 4, 2023 by HarperCollins B and Blackstone Publishing. ISBN 9798212691642. Runtime 11hrs, 31mins. Narrated by Kristin Atherton.