Book review: The Little Stranger
About half way through The Little Stranger, I had to put it down. It was late, I was in bed, I still hadn’t washed my face or brushed my teeth, and I was reading a passage about a man being haunted by something very scary in a bathroom. I couldn’t read any more for fear that I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed again that night.
Most of this book isn’t scary. If you read any of it out of context, you probably wouldn’t find it scary at all. But it is a constant accumulation - the story creeps into you. It is set post WWII in an old country estate, which is slowly but surely crumbling as the Ayres family living there struggle to keep up with its maintenance. Everything is seen through the eyes of an outside - Doctor Faraday - who becomes close to (and later slightly obsessed by) the family.
I can just picture the house - old, creaky, endless dark corridors and damp, cold rooms. Rodderick, the eldest son, was deeply affected by the war. He was left with burn scars over his arms and face and went in to a deep depression when he returned home to be nursed by his mother and sister. With all the pressure of being the lord of the manor weighing upon his 20-something-year-old shoulders, it seems that stress is an easy explanation for his certainty that there is something evil living in the house - an infection that he has to stave off.
But is stress all that’s causing it? Despite the doctor’s best efforts, soon the mother and sister are soon starting to believe in ghosts. Even our kind protagonist, Doctor Faraday, who starts out with all the good intentions in the world, soon starts to turn obsessive and sinister as the house weaves its way deeper into his life. Something is just not right about Hundreds House.
Read it! Read it, read it, read it. I love Sarah Waters. I realised when I finished this that there are still two books that I haven’t read by her, something that I aim to correct as soon as possible!
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
