FINAL BOY

Let’s start with something on the more accessible end of horror writing. Darcy Coates tends to write haunted house stories, and this one is a really good jumping off point for her work. Darcy Coates is sometimes described as a ‘cosy horror writer’ and that doesn’t mean that there are no scares and it is the chicken korma of horror – but more that its the sort of writing and story that will unsettle you, make you feel a bit creepy, might even make you jump, but it isn’t setting out to try to make you lose your lunch or have a sleepless night. Nor is it particularly trying to use horror as a mirror to some social issue in the world and make you think about it in a new way.

It is more – if you imagine that Agatha Christie was instead of writing country house murders with a jewelled dagger in the back of a tweedy colonel going for a house where the history of deaths and murder within it had left unsettled spirits with something to convey, that’s the sort of vibe.

The Carrow Haunt kicks off with our lead character Remy, a tour guide, taking a group around the most haunted hotel in the State. The hotel’s grisly history as a place where maybe ninety murders have taken place is outlined and we hear of some of the alleged spectres and that even after the worst of it, whoever takes on the building and tries to convert it into something new ends up with unexplained deaths and misfortune.

That’s a really simple and economical opening – we get a really good flavour of the hotel – the back story is delivered in a punchy way, because its a tour, and we also get to know our lead. We don’t see any ghosts, so maybe the stories are just stories.

At the end of the tour, one of the guests offers a lot of money to be able to stay at the hotel for two weeks – with Remy as a guide and a small group of curious amateurs and professionals – a YouTuber who is all about the EMF meters and cameras and a medium who is decidedly on the theatrical side and very huffy about anyone who doubts her gift.

That’s the set-up and it is all done in a few chapters – we’re off and running. We see the group dynamics, glean that some people aren’t being entirely candid about how they feel about each other or what they are here for, and we start to get the odd phenomenon. Ambiguous at first and then they ramp up, and then we start to wonder if these are ghosts or if one of the group is doing things – either on their own or in league with the ghosts.

We keep being told by the medium that ghosts can’t hurt anyone, but it turns out she’s very wrong about that.

There’s a really strong sense of place – the Carrow Haunt is creepy and dusty and you can feel the rottenness of the floorboards and the ocean spray hitting the windows.

The mystery is solid and the moments where the group are anxiously eyeing each other up and setting out just why each of them are suspicious and could be up to no good are really strong and will be shared by the reader. There’s no awful gore, but there are some genuinely eerie and unsettling moments – something happens with a plate of sandwiches for example that feels really visceral on the page.

The reading experience was a good dose of intrigue early on and then from the midway point the accelerator pedal is just pressed down HARD and the short chapters which propel the action along really make you just want to finish perhaps one more.

I’d definitely read more Darcey Coates, and I think this would be a perfect book for anyone who is curious about horror but doesn’t want to jump right into the deep end. Its obviously no Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, but if you’re refusing to read haunted house books that don’t live up to that beacon then you’re not going to read many haunted house books. It doesn’t have that psychodrama or ambiguity, but it is just a fast-paced, intriguing ghost story that you can tear through and end up pretty satisfied by.

My one criticism would be that once in a while you get a sentence of dialogue that looks like a placeholder for “This character needs to say something like blah-di-blah here – come back and make that better later” that never got the come back later edit. And maybe we could get to know Remy a bit more by the end of the book.

One of the great things about Darcy Coates is that she’s got an absolute ton of books, so if you try her and like what she does, you’re going to have a good amount to try out, and she’s prolific in getting new books out too, so there isn’t too long a wait for the new one.