Solace House by Will Maclean reviews – fantastic gothic horror with a psychedelic twist | Fiction

“Man,” says one of Will Maclean’s characters when he sees for the first time the house called Solace House. Here, perhaps, are self-deprecating eyes in a book full of them – a book that throws (old, ugly, rusty tapes coughing up red-brown liquid) to the problem of writing classic tales of strange gothic fiction.

What is present in the book – even when things are moving and what David Tennant’s Doctor Who would call “timey-wimey” things start to happen, the words are becoming difficult to support – and the summer of 1993. Alex Lane is alone in the hall of his university when the other students have left for vacation. He is broken. He is alone. He was very disappointed by the pale boy who seemed to be the only student left in the school. He can’t go home because of an unspecified family trauma that he only mentions as Doomsday and The Annihilator. And now he is receiving warnings that he is about to be deported and fined for overstaying.

After a while, a lifeline appears. He has offered a holiday job with the university, as one of a group of students clearing out an old refugee camp in a bad, swampy suburb nearby, before it can be converted into a new residential building. The asylum is called Marshlands. And next to the house is a large gothic building called Solace House.

The strange pale boy – he’s called Adam – was also found to be among the purists, along with other well-known 90s archetypes. Helen is a Christian; Clive is ugly and stoned; Ruth is a Goth; Leo is fresh, dirty and into psychedelics; Malcolm is handsome and gay; Ella – who our husband sleeps with, until Adam gets really angry – has red hair and is a witch. Smoked bones; cheap red wine and spag bol served; arrogant mockery.

The Marshlands are dirty and crowded, but it’s only when the cleaners arrive at Solace House that the fun begins. This large area, we are told, was once owned by Edwin Flayne, who died at the age of 102 after leaving the house for many years. As well as being aloof, he was – in the words that students in 1993 would reach – madder than Mad Jack McMad, the winner of the previous year’s Mr Madman competition.

He was also a banker. The basement of Solace House has a ceiling stacked with old newspapers and knick-knacks. The tubes are not wide enough for a single student to wind through the detritus. The strange phone rings unanswered, time and time again, somewhere deep inside that you can’t reach. Also, a sure sign of madness: Flayne was a poet. His strange epic in terrible quatrains – all ancient, strange names and twisted feet – are reproduced two quatrains at once as epigraphs to the chapters of the book.

Oh, the countless times I’ve passed,
Endless hours gray, turgid.
A good opportunity was just lost. It is gone, alas!
In vain eternal abandoned.

Does Solace House stand on the “thin line” where the effects of worlds beyond our own enter our reality? It does. Was Edwin Flayne pursuing, through mad mathematics and dark magic, secrets that man was not supposed to know? He was. Was Flayne’s beloved mother a redhead named Ella? Oh yes. Do both the names Adam and Alex, which are like acrostics, refer to Flayne Abel’s father’s surname? They do. Is there a hedge maze and an ancient cave? There is. Does everyone’s shopping for even the most popular items start to slow down? It does. Can anyone take the magic mushroom? Oh yes.

Perhaps the closest comparison to Solace House is not the book, but the TV franchise True Detective; but behind Arthur Machen, Charles Williams and HP Lovecraft. Some of the things that the reader can catch may be The Secret History and House of Leaves (it’s not a House of Leaves – but then, what is?). Hell, there’s even a whiff of Green Knowe Kids in there. And it shares its magic with the recent Francis Spufford No. Therefore, it is a big part of all those good things, which work like crazy to entertain and confuse the readers. 500 odd pages are passing.

If you had to write it, you could say that – like the house – it is a little full, and Maclean scratches a little when he tries to show the mysterious place of confusion beyond time, space and limited human understanding. But, like, that’s a little bit the nature of that place. Gothic, man. It tries very hard. It should. If these things are your jam, you’ll love it. And – publicly! – there are clever and satisfying twists and turns towards the end that make sense even in this terrible poem.