This House is Haunted

August 5, 2013
In 1867 England, 21-year-old Eliza Caine is left completely alone in the world when her father suddenly takes ill and dies. In a fit of melancholia, she responds to an advertisement for a governess to care for a pair of children in the wilds of Norfolk. When she receives a positive response, Eliza realizes that her life is about to undergo a cataclysmic change: she has never been out of London, she has never been a governess, and she knows nothing about Gaudlin Hall—which turns out to be an imposing pile of a building, spine-chillingly odd, unsettling, and spooky—or her new employers. Drawing sometimes excessively on Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, and the works of Wilkie Collins and Dickens, Boyne (The House of Special Purpose) creates a subtle, satisfying tale of ghostly terror.