House of Doors

December 12, 2011
Freshly widowed and raw with grief in the middle of the London blitz, nurse Ruth Taylor would prefer reassignment to a foreign land, where she hopes to meet a bullet with her name on it. Instead she accepts a post at RAF Morwood, an ugly, isolated country estate once known as D’Espérance. Here, pilots who have suffered disfiguring burns and crippling injuries receive the newest and boldest medical treatment, and the cold, sinister Major Black prepares them for dark, dangerous tasks. Ruth arrives with trepidation and with the literal ghost of her late husband on her heels, and soon the spirit poses a danger not just to her but to everyone at Morwood. Brenchley (River of the World) clearly knows the language and motifs of gothic country-house horror; despite occasionally labored prose and an odd overfondness for the word “brutal,” he turns genre conventions to his advantage with genuinely disturbing moments of terror and his complex, deeply troubled heroine.

February 1, 2012
A war story that leaves a nurse trapped in a house she's convinced is possessed. War widow and nurse Ruth Taylor is driven to go to the front lines to provide care to soldiers and join her husband Peter in eternal rest. Instead of being sent to her first-choice posting, Ruth ends up at D'Esperance, a huge mansion in the middle of nowhere that's been converted into an army hospital/training camp for the wounded. Ruth knows that war nurses should be made of strong stuff, but when she sees her husband's face in the wood grain of the door of D'Esperance, she loses consciousness and falls to the floor. Even after recovering from her initial shock, Ruth is certain that something's not right with the house. The soldiers are men with skin pieced together like puzzles, all of them ravaged by war, but Major Black, the officer in charge, seems to have some future plan for them. When mysterious things begin happening throughout the house, Ruth is convinced she can figure out the truth if only she can get to the heart of what is happening behind D'Esperance's closed doors. Brenchley (Desdaemona, as Ben Macallan, 2011, etc.) offers more questions than answers, creating a mysterious atmosphere without establishing a strong enough plot to make sense of it all.

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