At a glance
An addictive and brilliant puzzle-box of a novel—somewhere between The Secret History and House of Leaves—following a group of university students who discover an astonishing secret while clearing out a neglected Victorian mansion.
For Alex Lane’s wealthy university friends, the summer break stretches out before them, full of promise and fabulous plans. But for Alex, broke as usual, going home is not an option. So when the university offers him an unusual summer job clearing out a dilapidated Victorian mansion, Solace House, he jumps at the chance.
Alex joins an unlikely crew of students, from stoner Clive to uptight, short-tempered Helen, and the extremely peculiar Adam. Alex is particularly drawn to mercurial, red-headed Ella, and as the students begin sorting through piles of old newspapers and magazines, dusty antiques, and esoteric junk, Alex and Ella become enthralled by the elaborate and eerie journals of the house’s former owner, Edwin Flayne. In these diaries, Flayne details his obsession with his missing mother and his belief in a mysterious realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions on how it might be reached.
As the students gradually uncover the house’s secrets, the rift between those who want to delve further and those who believe they’ve already gone too far grows ever wider. And as the reader descends into this beguiling and brilliant novel, they find that they simply can’t stop turning the pages…
Don’t just take
our word for it
“If you’re missing Donna Tartt, read this...With Solace House, [Maclean] has taken the shackles off. A quite mad book about madness, it most resembles Stephen King’s The Shining...There are horrors here that you will not get out of your head.”
- The Telegraph
“A decaying Victorian mansion becomes the focal point of a novel that blends Gothic unease with cosmic horror, using its haunted spaces to explore grief, obsession and the fragile boundary between reality and imagination...Thoughtful, unsettling and ambitious, it is less interested in delivering conventional scares than in evoking a slow, disorientating collapse of reality itself.”
- Irish Times
“Maclean proves to be a master at pacing, creating suspense with ease; nothing is predictable in this novel, least of all the shocking conclusion. His characters are beautifully drawn...While the mood is both psychedelic and gothic, with unmistakable Lovecraft-ian overtones, it’s very much anchored in the early 1990s, an era Maclean brings to life flawlessly. Brilliantly written and scary as hell, this is a masterwork of horror fiction. Original, mind-bending, terrifying fun.”
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)🌟
