Courting Shadows

I was frustrated because I wanted more to happen – it felt like he was setting up the elements of a classic Gothic novel: Redbourne, the Creepy Nobleman [Redbourne might not be noble, but that's the function he's carrying out] in a Weird Home who lives alone and interferes in the main story for reasons of his own; Ann, the Maiden; the strange paintings and carvings in the church; weird possible incest with Daniel and Ann; Stannard's visions; the unearthing of a coffin with a strangely undecayed woman in it. But then he does nothing with most of those elements.

One of my biggest frustrations with books that might have something supernatural going on but the author wants to be cagey about it is releasing or not releasing the tension show more created by the atmosphere. Poster is very good at prose and atmosphere. But there's no release at all. I don't want everything to be explained, and I definitely don't want it to have a climatic overt supernatural action of some sort, but there has to be more to a book than there was to this one.

Stannard is awful, and is meant to be awful, but he never realizes it, so his character never changes & he doesn't get insight into himself or into, really, anything; the end is ambiguous, but not really in an interesting way; about three quarters of the threads Poster introduces are dropped. I don't think an interesting narrator (and Stannard was interesting) and the concept "well-off Victorian men could be unpleasant and blinded by class and other prejudice" are enough to hang the weight of even a short book on. show less

A truly unlikeable narrator. John Stannard, a very haughty architect, attempts to renovate an old English church in the countryside in the 1880's. Having no sympathy for anything or anybody, he proceeds to wreak havoc and destruction in the church and to the people in the town, especially a young woman he meets.

There is very little action in this book, especially in the beginning. The pace of this novel is slow and haunting - picture every day being cold and gray and wet. Something bad is always happening. John justifies all of it, telling himself he can't possibly be in the wrong.

I was curious to see how this all turned out in the end. The pace quickens toward the end. It is a story about stories and how everyone's viewpoint is just show more slightly off from the actual truth. show less

Very well-written but rather unpleasant novel about a Victorian architect who goes to restore a country church. He is a nasty character who causes trouble all around him.

Not only was I mesmerized by this story, I studied fiction under Jem Poster at the University of Aberystwyth in 2009-10. His ability to spin a lyrical tale and his precise, poetic-sounding delivery while reading from his work is astounding.