The Little Stranger

Do not go into "The Little Stranger" thinking you will get a straightforward story about frightening apparitions and disembodied voices, the kinds of in-your-face scares that most people look for in this type of story.. This is, much like Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" before it, a tale of psychological terror, one that picks away slowly and agonizingly at the sanity of its characters. Waters will pick at your imagination, stealing it well into the wee hours that you'll be reading.

This was a wonderfully suspenseful novel about the decline of an English gentry family and their home. As in many gothic novels, the house is a character in this book and declines as the family does. There's a supernatural element introduced and Waters does a great job intertwining the family and the home's decline so that it's never clear where the destruction is stemming from. The book is narrated by a doctor who befriends the family and has his own ties to the house. His mother had been a servant there and he remembers visiting the home as a child. His reliability in relating the story was questionable throughout and added an interesting element to the book.

This is a book that will keep you turning the pages; it's well written and show more fun to read. In the end, though, I don't feel like it was really anything new, so I haven't rated it very highly. I think most people would really enjoy it though - it was fun to read. show less

This literary effort, on the short list for the Booker prize, was billed in the dust jacket as a "ghost story," but perhaps that's a bit misleading. The source of the odd happenings in this book is a bit more ambiguous than that.

What haunts the halls of old Hundreds Hall? Is it the spirit of a child, lost too young? A poltergiest, perhaps the errant psychic energies of some more contemporary soul? Or merely a tragic-but-ordinary mental instability running through the bloodlines of the Ayres family?

Local physician Dr. Faraday -- risen from humble origins, son of a woman who once worked as a nursery maid at Hundreds Hall -- finds himself drawn into the increasingly odd struggles of the Ayres family. A man of rational, scientific views, show more he rejects the possibility of paranormal forces at work in the Ayres ancestral home. And yet . . .

This story is not an in-your-face spookfest. The suspense builds slowly, the chills are often subtle. The characters are carefully developed to serve their purposes in the overall story -- and none is more complex than Faraday himself, our narrator, who starts out as a thoroughly sympathetic character in the early pages of the novel, but whose flaws become almost annoyingly apparent as the story progresses to its climax.

The Little Stranger is definitely a novel with plenty of atmosphere, infused with the air of a time when fortunes dried up for many and a time-honored way of life was crumbling like the bricks of old Hundreds Hall, the primary setting of this dark tale. show less

This book scared the bejesus out of me. Being something of a wuss, that might not be saying a great deal about its scariness, but I thought Waters managed brilliantly to balance the creaking genre floorboards, a very evocative depiction of crumbling English aristocracy and a disturbingly twisted, multi-layered romance in one post-Freudian package. Its flawed, annoying, fascinating characters, particularly our dubious narrator, held my attention to the very last page. A page which contained a rather brilliant way to end the story with its ambiguously creepy form of closure. A great story.

Mrs Ayres sighed. 'How this house likes to catch us out, doesn't it? As if it knows all our weaknesses and is testing them, one by one . . . God, how dreadfully tired I am.

Were the strange and tragic events at Hundreds Hall caused by the ghost of a dead child, a poltergeist linked to the presence of a homesick adolescent maid, a taint of ancestral madness, the phantasm of a living person obsessed by the house (whether through wanting to possess the house, or wanting to escape from it), or by the house itself complaining of neglect? I quite like the fact that you never find out what has caused the strange events at Hundreds Hall, although the last few pages do seem to point in one direction.

Both the family and their servants realise show more that it is the Ayres family who are being targetted. The servants may be teased and frightened, but it is only members of the family who are harmed. 'I haven't done nothing,' she said, 'and I haven't said nothing! I don't like to think of it, anyhow. It makes me frit if I think about it when I'm downstairs on me own. It isn't my bad thing, that's what Mrs Bazeley says. If I don't go bothering him, she says, he won't come bothering me.'

I found Doctor Faraday quite creepy. He worms his way into the household, and seems not to see how much of a burden the decrepit house is to the Ayres family. Or rather, he does not want to see it, and no matter how many times they mention it, he brushes their worries aside. I noticed that it is shortly after he hears that Rod may possibly stop him from using the short-cut across the park, that Faraday started to push for Rod being committed, either voluntarily or against his will. Rod has to be got rid of because he is the one who keeps reminding his mother and sister of Faraday's social inferiority, and I don’t think he would ever have countenanced Faraday courting his sister. So I am leaning towards the trigger being the arrival of Doctor Faraday; maybe his obsessions did lead to the creation of a phantasm, but maybe he gave events the odd push himself, either consciously or not.

Although it is hard to tell Faraday's real motivation because he is the one telling the story, and no doubt twisting it to put himself in a better light, I don't think he loves Caroline at all. I think that in order to raise his social status and get his hands on Hundreds Hall, he is willing to put up with her plain looks, but only as long as she conducts herself as a member of the landed gentry should. He seems to actively hate her whenever he sees her covered in dirt doing housework like a maid, His obsession with the decaying house that is in reality a millstone round the Ayres' neck is senseless. It is not as if he is 'new money' riding to the rescue, like Caroline's ugly but extremely wealthy great-grandmother; he is a struggling doctor from working-class roots, who doesn't even own his own house. With him as head of the family and refusing obdurately to sell up, Hundreds Hall would have continued to fall apart, eating up the family's remaining capital and leaving them with nothing.

But he still got what he wanted in the end. show less

This is a gothic, a ghost story, as well as a portrait of a country doctor and of gentry in decline in post-WWII England. Sarah Waters captures the time and the place and the atmospheric creepiness of a decaying manor house. The horror is subtle, but it’s the kind I like best: a creeping sense of wrongness, the horror mostly psychological and most often just hinted at and not overexplained.

[This is a review I wrote in 2009]

**Shortlisted for the Man Booker 2009. A haunting ghost story**

Sarah Waters captures the divisive power of class resentment in post-war middle England with an eloquence of narration which few contemporary writers can claim to equal. The Little Stranger works for the reader on several levels: as a haunting ghost story, reminiscent of accomplished nineteenth-century authors like Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as more modern writers like Margaret Atwood; yet also as a powerful social novel of class divide, society rules and customs, sexual repressions and the beginnings of sexual freedom for women, political upheaval, public health reform, and of course the demise of the English Country show more House. The novel is set during a period of great change for the country - new ideas were being questioned, old values were being questioned, and thrown into the mix are these supernatural happenings - can psychical research explain these away, or imbalances of the mind? There is no answer with this novel, just many questions; all of which combine to leave you with thoughts long after you have finished reading.

So why only 4 stars? Well, in places I felt the book could have benefited from some tighter editing which I personally feel could have made the book brilliant, rather than just very good, and then of course there's the cover. It shouldn't matter but it does. The cover just does not suit the novel at all. (I have the Virago hardback. Have a look at the cover for the American edition by Riverhead - it suits the book much better). Overall it is very, very good, with some superb writing - Sarah Waters is very accomplished at winding tension slowly at first, and then tighter and tighter until the last thing you can think of is putting the book down to go and do those chores, or go to sleep. As an extra bonus, if you are familiar with the Warwickshire countryside, especially around Warwick, Leamington and Southam you will find extra pleasures in reading about a lovely part of the country which does not often turn up in literary fiction. show less