A book about the sort of characters who have never read a horror story, and pay for it dearly. The sort of character who, when confronted by a creepy old house, think "How inconvenient!!" When they find that the creepy locked door, from which creepy sounds have been emerging in the night, is now unlocked, and swinging open, think that they cannot believe their luck that a servant has opened it for them. The sort of characters who deserve everything that is coming to them ...
Purcell has clearly done her homework, and she knows her crinoline from her bombazine (or vice versa ...) but detail doesn't build tension. It doesn't help that characters are cardboard cutouts of Victorian romance cliches (surly servants and villages, with the worst "ohh, lawks, guv'nor" fake accents you ever don't want to hear, moustache twirling villains ...), even if that has to be achieved by a complete lack of consistency.
Elsie, the protagonist, is both embarrassed by her humble family background (? factory owners? OK, not Lady of the Manor status, but Purcell seems to think that this makes her, literally, the Little Match Girl ...), and putting on airs and graces like a duchess. That would be wonderfully complicated and ironic, if it didn't feel like the character's reactions are being made up, randomly, from line to line.
Chapters I have read alternate between a "present" where Elsie is confined in a hospital/mental institution, following some terrible catastrophe that has left several (unnamed) people dead, and chapters set x years earlier, when Elsie arrives at the creepy house, pregnant and widowed following the mysterious death of her husband after only a few weeks of marriage. I gave up when another timeline was introduced, featuring a distant ancestor of the husband who was accused of witchcraft.
This wasn't fun, it wasn't scary.
Purcell has clearly done her homework, and she knows her crinoline from her bombazine (or vice versa ...) but detail doesn't build tension. It doesn't help that characters are cardboard cutouts of Victorian romance cliches (surly servants and villages, with the worst "ohh, lawks, guv'nor" fake accents you ever don't want to hear, moustache twirling villains ...), even if that has to be achieved by a complete lack of consistency.
Elsie, the protagonist, is both embarrassed by her humble family background (? factory owners? OK, not Lady of the Manor status, but Purcell seems to think that this makes her, literally, the Little Match Girl ...), and putting on airs and graces like a duchess. That would be wonderfully complicated and ironic, if it didn't feel like the character's reactions are being made up, randomly, from line to line.
Chapters I have read alternate between a "present" where Elsie is confined in a hospital/mental institution, following some terrible catastrophe that has left several (unnamed) people dead, and chapters set x years earlier, when Elsie arrives at the creepy house, pregnant and widowed following the mysterious death of her husband after only a few weeks of marriage. I gave up when another timeline was introduced, featuring a distant ancestor of the husband who was accused of witchcraft.
This wasn't fun, it wasn't scary.
