The Little Stranger

Categories: Horror & Supernatural , Fiction

Here's an eerie novel to put a chill in a hot summer day. It’s Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.

Dr. Faraday, the son of a former maid at Hundreds, a country house in Warwickshire, remembers vividly when he entered the house as a boy, just after World War I. He was entranced by its grandeur and the glimpse of the family life he saw.

Now he’s entering the house as an adult, called in to replace the Ayres family’s usual practitioner.

The old house is a wreck, the family just barely able to keep it open. The son of the family, Roderick, still suffers from the injuries and shellshock he suffered as an RAF pilot; his mother seems out of place in the now-crumbling house; and his sister, Caroline, a plain and awkward young woman, is struggling to keep them together.

Faraday is attracted to them all, and he can’t help feel pride that he, a boy of the servant class, is able to move in their social circle. He’s eager to step in when Roderick shows signs of nervous shock, imagining that an evil presence in the house is threatening the family.

Faraday helps get the young man into a private mental hospital after a terrible injury to a visiting child and then a midnight fire at Hundreds. All the while, he is becoming infatuated with Caroline, though Caroline seems to blow hot and cold about him.

Then Mrs. Ayres begins to show signs of the same madness that affected her son, believing that her long-dead child is trying to reach her.

Is Caroline next? Why is she calling off the marriage to Faraday that she assented to? Is it madness, the financial pressure of keeping up a now-dead lifestyle, a poltergeist, or (spookiest of all) our narrator himself who is behind the eerie events at Hundreds?

Waters weaves a wonderfully creepy story of psychological suspense, marvelously evoking the ice-cold, crumbling grand house, the strained social world of post-war England, and the unvoiced but unmistakable class barriers that wall in all of her characters.

This will certainly send a chill down your spine, no matter the hot summer weather.