White is for Witching

Miranda misses her mother with particular intensity and this seems to attract the silent but hungry spirits of the strange, creepy mansion in which she lives.

This house speaks; it’s a character in the novel and its voice is malevolent. This is a house that decides which residents will go and which must stay; a place where apples grow in winter and manikins walk.

As the days pass, the house reveals and conceals secret floors and their hidden prisoners; the spirits of the missing who are imprisoned within its walls.

Helen Oyeyemi was a literary prodigy who appears to be making a comfortable transition to being an established author. The novel begins with the disappearance of Cambridge undergraduate Miranda from her home. Her mother is dead, killed by a stray bullet in Haiti when Miranda and her brother Eliot were just 16. Lily’s mother, the uber-selfish Jennifer, mysteriously vanished when Lily was only a year old, leaving the baby to be raised by her grandmother, Anna Good.

It is in Anna’s large house where Miranda and Eliot live with their father, Luc, who runs the place as a boarding house – though he finds it extremely hard to keep his staff. Certainly something is amiss here. Miranda suffers from an eating disorder, pica – the habit of eating objects that are not food. Her taste is for chalk and plastic cutlery, and the effect on a household that survives by selling hospitality is disturbing.

The house must, and will, prevail. Joining forces with Miranda’s brother and her best friend Ore, it tells her story – haunting, spine-tingling and macabre. A truly absorbing read.