Houses play important parts in some of the very best scary stories, whether it’s the immortal genius of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (“silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone”) or the mind-bending chills of Mark Z Danielewski’s The House of Leaves. Simon Lelic’s The House appears to set out its stall accordingly: a young couple are looking for their first home together in London. The market is desperately competitive, and the one home they miraculously succeed in snapping up ahead of a horde of rivals is definitively creepy, packed floor to ceiling with the former owner’s junk, from old coats to stuffed dead birds.
Jack, one of Lelic’s narrators, hates it from the first. “The house stood alone (‘detached’, marvelled the brochure) as though it had been shunned,” he tells us portentously. “There was a row of terraced houses on one side, huddled together as though for safety, and a block of flats with its back turned on the other. It looked – and felt – somehow ostracised.”
We know where we’re going with this: it feels pretty run of the mill, albeit just right for a late October read. But then Lelic introduces his second narrator, Jack’s girlfriend Sydney, and the novel turns into something else altogether. “First off: this isn’t a ghost story. OK? Let’s make that very fucking clear. The house stood alone as though shunned. Who do you think you are, Jack – Stephen King?” she spits. “Creepy house, creepy furnishings, a happy (ish) couple moving in all dumb and cheerful. All the elements are there.”
Jack and Sydney are, we learn, writing down their versions of what has led them to the situation they now find themselves in. “What we said was, we wouldn’t just write down what’s happened but also what we thought and what we felt,” says Sydney. “So there’s a chance whoever ends up reading this will actually believe us.” We don’t know what has happened yet, but it’s clear it’s bad, and involves knives and blood. As Jack and Sydney slowly reveal more, jumping back and forth in time as their story layers together, we begin to glean more details: the smell, which is worst in one part of the house. The gruesome discovery Jack makes in the loft. The photograph that makes Sydney’s mum jump out of her skin. Movements in the night: “That’s when I heard it again. The sound that had woken me. It was a shuffling, skidding sort of sound: more the slip of a sole than the clunk of a central-heating pipe.”
So we’ve two narrators, ostensibly in love but clearly hiding things from each other, telling us dual versions of a story that aren’t quite matching up, as the cover is slowly peeled off a chilling backstory, and as the police circle closer. “Something else was becoming clearer in my mind too. Something darker. It was like I was peering down into a pit, watching the shadows there slowly taking shape,” says Sydney, wonderfully spookily.
Sometimes Lelic’s two voices – Sydney’s sharp as a tack and streetwise, Jack’s that of an all-round good guy – stray a little too close to each other, and the denouement is a little far-fetched. But piecing it all together is half the fun – this isn’t your high-end literary thriller, but it’s a bundle of creepy chills, perfectly timed for Halloween. Is it a “fucking ghost story”? Read it and find out.
• The House by Simon Lelic is published by Penguin (£7.99). To order a copy for £6.79, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99
