Solace House by Will Maclean review – immensely fun gothic horror with a psychedelic twist | Fiction

“Man,” says one of Will Maclean’s characters on catching sight for the first time of the titular Solace House. “Gothic always tries too hard.” Here, perhaps, is a self-deprecating wink in a novel full of them – a novel that throws the (ancient, sinister, rusted taps coughing a disquieting red-brown liquid) kitchen sink at the problem of writing a good old-fashioned piece of gothic-flavoured weird fiction.

The present of the novel – though as things proceed and what David Tennant’s Doctor Who would call “timey-wimey” stuff starts to happen, the phrase gets harder to sustain – is the summer of 1993. Alex Lane stays on alone in his university’s hall of residence after the other students take off for the holidays. He’s broke. He’s lonely. He’s a bit freaked out by a sinister pale boy who seems to be the only other student left on campus. He can’t go home because of an unspecified family trauma involving what he alludes to only as The Last Day and The Annihilator. And now he’s receiving warnings that he’s about to be kicked out and charged for overstaying.

Just in time, a lifeline appears. He’s offered holiday work by the university, as one of a team of students clearing out an old asylum in a dismal, marshy area of the countryside nearby, ahead of its being turned into a new halls of residence. The asylum is called Marshlands. And next door to it stands a decrepit gothic mansion called Solace House.

The weird pale boy – he’s called Adam – also turns out to be on the clean-up crew, alongside some slightly cursorily characterised early 90s student archetypes. Helen is a Christian; Clive is obnoxious and stoned; Ruth is a goth; Leo is new-agey, dreadlocked and keen on psychedelics; Malcolm is beautiful and gay; Ella – with whom our man falls into bed, much to Adam’s apparent rage – is red-haired and bewitching. Joints are smoked; cheap red wine and spag bol dispatched; pretentious banter exchanged.

Marshlands is dirty and cluttered, but it’s when the clean-up crew reach Solace House itself that the fun really starts. This vast space, we’re told, was the abode of one Edwin Flayne, who died at the age of 102 having barely left the house in decades. As well as being a recluse, he was – in the catchphrase that students in 1993 might reach for – madder than Mad Jack McMad, winner of last year’s Mr Madman competition.

He was also a hoarder. Solace House’s dingy ground floor is stacked floor to ceiling with old newspapers and knackered knick-knacks. Tunnels barely wide enough for one student to navigate side-on wind through the detritus. A mysterious telephone rings unanswered, from time to time, somewhere deep in the inaccessible interior. Also, surer sign of madness: Flayne was a poet. His blithering epic in terrible quatrains – all archaisms, portentous abstract nouns and inverted feet – is reproduced two quatrains at a time as epigraphs to the chapters of the novel.

O, uncountable span I now surpass,
Incessant grey hours, turgid.
Noble opportunity wasted. Gone, alas!
In nullity endless deserted.

Does Solace House stand at a “thin place” where the emanations of worlds beyond our own seep through into our reality? It does. Was Edwin Flayne pursuing, through demented maths and dark magic, mysteries that man was not meant to know? He was. Was Flayne’s beloved mother a redhead called Ella? Uh huh. Do both Adam and Alex’s full names, set as acrostics, spell out the name of Flayne’s father’s name Abel? They do. Are there a hedge maze and an ancient cavern? There are. Does everyone’s purchase on even the mundane details of reality start to get a little hinky? It does. Is everyone going to end up taking a shit ton of magic mushrooms? Oh yes.

Perhaps the strongest comparator to Solace House isn’t a novel, but the TV franchise True Detective; yet behind that stand Arthur Machen, Charles Williams and HP Lovecraft. Other flavours the reader will catch might be The Secret History and House of Leaves (it’s no House of Leaves – but then, what is?). Hell, there’s even a whiff of The Children of Green Knowe in there. And it shares a little of its occult territory with Francis Spufford’s recent Nonesuch. So, it’s a great hotchpotch of all that good stuff, working like mad to entertain and spook the reader. The 500-odd pages whip by.

If you had to mark it down, you’d say that – like the house – it’s a bit overstuffed, and that Maclean scrabbles a bit when he’s trying to gesture at the ineffable mind-mangling realms beyond time, space and puny human comprehension. But, like, that’s slightly the nature of those realms. Gothic, man. It tries too hard. It has to. If this stuff is your jam, you’ll love it. And – chapeau! – there’s a clever and satisfying twist towards the end that even makes some sense of that terrible poetry.