About the Book
Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft’s family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken.
But Dr Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the same disease in the cliffs beneath his new Cornish home. While he devotes himself to his controversial medical trials, Louise finds herself increasingly discomfited by the strange tales her new maid tells of the fairies that hunt the land, searching for those they can steal away to their realm.
Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at Morvoren House to take up a position as nurse to the now partially paralysed and almost entirely mute Miss Pinecroft. Hester has fled to Cornwall to try and escape her past, but surrounded by superstitious staff enacting bizarre rituals, she soon discovers that her new home may be just as dangerous as her last.
Format: ebook (448 pages) Publisher: Raven Books
Publication date: 19th September 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction
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My Review
The book alternates between three different timelines, curiously in the reverse order to what you might expect based on the blurb, opening with the woman who now calls herself Hester arriving at Morvoren House. The events forty years earlier involving Louise Pinecroft’s efforts to help her father in his experimental treatment of patients with tuberculosis don’t appear until later in the book. This part is fascinating as it illuminates the lack of knowledge about the causes of the disease at the time (probably late 18th Century) but it is also rather distressing to witness the “treatments” Dr. Pinecroft inflicts on his patients in an increasingly crazed desire to succeed in finding a cure.
I was particularly drawn to Hester’s story as we find out more about the reasons for her sudden departure from her previous employment as maid to Lady Rose. I thought the author did a great job of making us feel sympathy for her whilst at the same time introducing a sense of unease as we learn what has occurred in previous positions she’s occupied. Her desperation to be valued by Lady Rose and her disappointment when she realises the difference in their social position can never bring about the sort of relationship she desires is painful to witness. At the same time, she commits an act that has dire consequences and I liked that the author challenged the reader’s view of Hester in this respect. The later parts of Hester’s story and, in particular, the final scene, I found less credible.
The ailing Miss Pinecroft that Hester encounters is very different to the Louise Pinecroft of forty years before and I wasn’t totally convinced by her transformation from down-to-earth capable young woman to a Miss Havisham type figure sat in a gloomy room full of china.
The book certainly has many of the ingredients you look for in a Gothic novel: a chilly brooding house in a remote location, unexplained noises and locked doors that don’t seem to keep things out. In fact, Hester’s first impression of Morvoren House is as something ‘not just bricks and pebbles but a living thing’. And Creeda, employed as nursemaid to Miss Pinecroft’s ward, with her strange ways, belief in fairies, changelings and the need for protective talismans, makes for an unsettlingly creepy character. (With her black gown and habit of suddenly appearing, she’s a bit Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, a bit Grace Poole from Jane Eyre.) But are the strange goings-on the result of malicious human agency, the product of a disturbed imagination or an actual supernatural presence? It’s up to the reader to decide. For me it all got a little bit bonkers towards the end but if you’re looking for a dramatic climax to a book then you won’t be disappointed.
I received a digital review copy courtesy of Raven Books via NetGalley
In three words: Atmospheric, chilling, unsettling
Try something similar: The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements
About the Author
Laura Purcell is a former bookseller and lives in Colchester with her husband and pet guinea pigs. Her first novel for Bloomsbury, The Silent Companions, was a Radio 2 and Zoe Ball ITV Book Club pick and was the winner of the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award, while Laura’s Gothic chiller, The Corset, was acclaimed as a ‘masterpiece’ by readers and reviewers alike. (Photo: Twitter profile)
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