TITLE: Property of a Lady (Nell West/Michael Flint 01)
AUTHOR: Sarah Rayne
GENRE: Horror
PUBLISHED: July 1, 2011
RATING: ★★ 1/2
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
When I decided to pick up Sarah Rayne’s Property of a Lady, the first in the Nell West/Michael Flint series, I had high hopes it would be a good haunted house story. I’d seen the buzz around the latest book in the series, Deadlight Hall. When I found out that the latter was part of a series, I decided that I might as well begin at the beginning.
Property of a Lady starts with Oxford professor Michael Flint reading an email from his friend Jack, who currently resides in the United States. In the email, Jack asks Michael for a favour: to look into an old house out in Shropshire, which Jack’s wife inherited when one of her relatives passed away. Jack also mentions that he’s been in contact with an antiques dealer in the nearby town, a woman named Nell West, and if Michael has the time he might want to check in with her as well.
In the meantime, darker things are happening: Nell’s daughter, Beth, is having nightmares, as is Jack’s daughter Ellie, who is also Michael’s goddaughter. Though the girls are separated by thousands of miles, they both talk about seeing a man with no eyes; additionally, Ellie keeps mentioning the name “Elvira”, whom her parents think is an imaginary friend. But when Beth suddenly disappears, and when Ellie’s nightmares start getting very bad, Michael and Nell’s paths cross as they try to figure out just what, precisely, happened at the property Jack’s wife has inherited: a place ominously named Charect House.
The thing about horror is that my engagement with it is always about more than just the scare. I’m sure a lot of readers go into the genre solely for the purpose of being scared, and are content if the medium in question (whether it’s a book or a movie or a video game) manages to do so, but I think that horror can (and should) accomplish more than that. It should explore themes that other genres don’t delve into very often, explore ideas that would otherwise be considered too “disturbing” for anything else. After all, just because something is “dark” or “troubling”, doesn’t mean it no longer deserves to be explored for the purpose of gaining insight. If the exploration involves being scared out of one’s wits, then that’s a good thing too, since finding out what scares oneself can be a revealing process for the reader, viewer, or player.
In the case of the haunted house story, there are plenty of potential angles a writer could delve into: history, family, and the darker aspects of human psychology can come together in interesting ways in a haunted house story. This is on top of everything else a writer may draw from to create creepy scenes: things like common household objects, local folklore, and architecture.
In terms of creating creepiness using the latter, Rayne actually succeeds. Take, for example, the first description of Charect House...
Charect House was larger than he had expected. It was a red-brick, four-square building with the tall flat windows of the Regency and crumbling stone pillars on each side of the front door. The brick had long since mellowed into a dark, soft red, and some kind of creeper covered the lower portions. Even with the rain it was possible to see the dereliction. The upper windows had shutters, half falling away, and all the window frames looked rotten. The roofline dipped ominously.
I’ll admit, there’s something about that sagging roof that sent a chill down my spine, and in broad daylight, at that. This description of Charect House is repeated (worded differently, but still more or less the same in the important details) at various crucial times throughout the novel, reinforcing the idea of the house itself being frozen in time. The idea of the house being trapped in time, like a fly in amber, is a nice touch; it gives the house the character of a revenant, instead of a graceful ruin.
Rayne also does well with turning ordinary objects into things to be feared. One of the most important items in the novel is a long-case clock, described thusly...
It was described as a moon-phase clock - the face of the moon was set in its own secondary arch-dial above the main, conventional one. … Nell supposed it was intended to look a little like illustrations in children’s books of the Man in the Moon smiling benignly down from the night sky, but seen from this angle it did not look at all benign. The face was half-visible, which presumably meant it was midway between moons when it stopped, and although it was probably a trick of the light or dust on the surface, it looked exactly like a full-faced man peering slyly over a wall. A Peeping Tom, thought Nell, studying it.
Like the description of the house, this description of the clock—in particular, of the moon’s face—is repeated at other points throughout the novel, giving it the same revenant feel as Charect House: except the clock does, in fact, come to life, as described in this eerie scene from the letters of Alice Wilson, a character who is important to the story but never appears outside of the documents she leaves behind...
The old clock’s ticking quietly away to itself in the corner, and I’m not sure that it’s quite as companionable as I thought. In fact, a couple of times I’ve felt like hurling something at its smug, swollen face to shut it up. But here’s a curious thing - twenty minutes ago I approached it with the intention of stuffing my scarf into the works to stop the mechanism, but when it came to it I couldn’t. I can’t explain it - but when I bent down and unlatched the door and saw the pendulum swinging to and fro, I was seized by such a violent aversion that I couldn’t even touch it.
Later on Alice adds the following commentary, which just cements the clock as the center of something truly dreadful...
What I will admit is that there can sometimes be a vague eeriness about the crossing of one day to the next, or one year to the next, as if something invisible’s being handed from one pair of hands to another. And I have to say that when the old clock in here chimed twelve a short time ago, it startled me considerably. (It’s somehow not a very nice chime either, although that’s probably due to rust in the mechanism.)
It was shortly after the chiming of the clock that something happened.
If one is not tempted to eliminate all ticking clocks from one’s household and switch to digital clocks after reading that, then one has a stronger stomach than I do.
There are other instances, of course, that chilled me even when I was sitting in a pool of strong summer sunshine: mysterious banging sounds from behind walls; eerie figures appearing in windows; strange singing heard at the oddest times. It’s clear that Rayne knows how to use plot and setting to create scenes that are bound to scare the living daylights out of the reader.
But does Rayne engage with the deeper ideas I mentioned previously? I think not. Charect House has a lot of character to it, but it does not become a character in its own right. Instead, it functions as a shell for the events that happened within it—events that are gruesome and troubling, to be sure, but are nevertheless remarkably similar to the "dark events" told in other haunted house stories, and, therefore, feel boring. One would think that a writer like Rayne, who can obviously create a scene so creepy it would chill the reader even in daylight, would be able to turn out a fresh, interesting tale focused around venomous jealousy and destructive hatred in a family setting, but that's not the case. Opportunities to tackle deeper themes related to class, madness, and women are present throughout the novel, but Rayne doesn't exploit those opportunities fully, choosing instead to focus on drama than on being insightful.
I also think the clock wasn’t used to its fullest potential as a plot element, nor as a launching point for tackling darker ideas about the line between love and obsession. There was plenty of buildup around it in the first half of the novel, and for it to be shoved aside in the second half was rather disappointing.
I think that’s what really disappoints me about this novel: the fact that it doesn't do anything new with the haunted house story, nor does it delve deeper into the many potential themes that could have been tackled. It’s just the same old pattern, repeated over again: dark and deadly things happen in the house; those events haunt the house just as surely as its ghosts do; and only by bringing the truth behind those events to light does the horror dissipate and, finally, come to an end.
Overall, Property of a Lady may appear to be a promising haunted house story, but it doesn’t quite live up to that promise. If the reader looks only for scares, then I suppose this novel does an adequate job: Rayne is great at using plot and setting to create creepy scenes that are sure to chill the reader to the bone (and maybe have them look askance at certain items around the household). But for readers who look for a novel that does something different with the haunted house story, and for readers who look for horror that goes beyond the scares and the creepiness, then this novel is certainly not what they seek.