Kate Collins’ gripping debut A Good House for Children breathes new life into British gothic fiction with its haunting tale of a cursed house on the Dorset coast, writes ADAM COLCLOUGH
The Reeve, a large house set high on a cliff along the Dorset coast, looks like their dream home to Nick and Orla. A place where they can get their family life back on track.
Appearances can be deceptive, the residents of the nearby village avoid the house as an unlucky place, and extend the same prejudice towards anyone living there. Not without good reason, the big old house harbours something dark that destroys every family that comes to live there.
The lonely old house with a secret that burns to ash everyone it touches is a familiar trope at the spookier end of British fiction. One that, when handled with the skill Kate Collins shows in this impressive debut, is still capable of delivering the goods.
The narrative switches between the experiences of Orla and her family in the present day and those of Lydia, a young woman employed by a family living in the house forty years earlier. Both are decidedly unsettling and seem to feed on tensions and tragedies the residents have brought to this sad place.
Collins makes skilful use of the dramatic Dorset coastline, particularly the way it can switch in a second from being a benign sunlit playground into the backdrop for a storm of epic proportions then back again. This links neatly with the unsettling imagery that leaks from Orla’s increasingly strange paintings until it seems to overwhelm reality.
She also writes with painful accuracy about the way the tensions boiling under the surface of family life can twist individuals out of shape. Distancing them from the person they believed themselves to be and making them unwilling actors in a play where the script makes no sense.
Is the Reeve a place haunted by some ancient and malign force, or are the ghosts walking there a product of the minds of its inhabitants? This is a question to which Collins does not provide a comfortingly easy answer.
Like all the best writers who make the badlands of the uncanny their territory, the ranks of whom she very much deserves to join, that unleashing their wildest speculations will keep her readers coming back for more.
On the strength of this excellent debut novel they are sure to keep doing so time and again.
A Good House for Children by Kate Collins is available from Amazon.
ADAM COLCOUGH lives in Penkhull, a village within the Staffordshire city of Stoke-on-Trent, that is mentioned in the Doomsday Book. It is also the location of two haunted pubs, sadly the ghosts have never come out to play during any of his frequent visits.
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