The mesmerizing English debut from the bestselling author of Meddling Kids—what begins as a gothic ghost story soon evolves into a wickedly twisted treasure hunt.
Months after the last of the Wells sons jumped out of his bedroom window in Axton House (incidentally forgetting to open it first), a strange couple of Europeans arrive in Virginia to take possession of the estate. A. is the 23-year-old unforeseen scion; Niamh is the mute punk teen girl he refers to as his associate or his bodyguard. Both are ready to settle into their new cushy lifestyle, and the rumors about the mansion being haunted add to their excitement. But ghosts are not in any way the deepest secret of the house.
Through journals, letters, security footage, audio recordings, and ciphers, we follow A. and Niamh as they delve into Wells’ dubious suicide, the secret society he founded and its mysterious Game —a “bourgeois pastime” of global proportions— in Edgar Cantero’s dazzling and original gothic adventure.
I went into this thinking I was getting a haunted house novel, something akin to [b:House of Leaves|24800|House of Leaves|Mark Z. Danielewski|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403889034s/24800.jpg|856555] with its found-footage, epistolary style of storytelling. While it does tell the story through letters, transcripts of audio and video recordings, and other books, it's not a story about a house at all. The house is the setting, but it's not a character. There is a haunting, but it's incidental to the main story. Instead, this is a wildly fun story about dreams and a secret society and codes and mythology and a garden maze. I enjoyed the whole thing quite a bit, including the fact that it was set in 1995 and therefore sidestepped the issue of cell phones and the modern day internet making some of the mysteries too easy to solve. The final scene also packs a great punch with its final revelations.
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25 October, 2014:
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25 October, 2014:
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