The house is too good to be true, isn’t it always? Maxine falls for the house hard, with its beautiful Georgian features, and desirable location in Peckham Rye. She doesn’t mind that there’s a lot of work to do to make it habitable, or the fact that most people were put off from buying it. It is Seb, her partner who is more cautious about the house, who notices a window had been nailed shut. I don’t know about you, but I would have alarm bells going off.  But Maxine sees her future with Seb in this house and that’s what matters. Work on the house hits a standstill once they move in and things begin to fall apart, Seb starts acting out of character and maybe the house has something to do with it, and maybe it doesn’t, either way,  it doesn’t help that Seb, a flash banker has a big secret. The house is a living entity; it hears your thoughts and observes you with its watchful walls and windows and communicates through groaning pipes.

The story moves between three eras with different residents inhabiting the house; Maxine and Seb move in 2008. In 1994 Cookie and his parents move into the attic room which they rent from Diana Lloyd when they lose all their money due to Cookie’s father’s gambling. Lee Delaney continues to gamble; he barely converses with his wife as he spends most of his time at the pub which is infamous for its dodgy characters and all you want to do is shake him and remind him that he has a loving son who needs taking care of. Diana, their landlady is a descendent of the original owner Horatio Lloyd. Horatio initially built the house in the eighteen hundreds on a beautiful plot of land overlooking the river Peck for his beloved wife who later dies suspiciously.  Horatio blames the pollution or ‘miasma’ as he puts it as the river becomes a vessel for human and animal waste. His rather modern thinking and actions seem to make people more fearful of him.

Through nights of broken sleep, unhinged and warped realities, each time frame have interconnecting themes that bring them tightly together. The consistent build up of tension culminates to a perfect breaking point.

Like the House of Usher, the house was once one of grandeur, igniting the story’s gothic undertones with its very own locked room. Brandished with atmospheric language and imagery, the reader’s cortisol simply keeps climbing higher with every knuckle crunch Maxine does out of stress, a bit like Jack Torrance’s lip licking in King’s The Shining. Maybe Lee Delaney is right when he says to his son Cookie, ‘These are the lowlands, Cooks. This is a valley, and all the muck washes into it. Nowhere else for it to go.’