Fiction Reviews
Starling House
(2023) Alix E. Harrow, Tor, £9.99, pbk, 438pp, ISBN 978-1-529-06114-7
This 2024 UK paperback release of the 2023 novel Starling House was, for this reviewer at least, something of a return to form for Alix E. Harrow. Having greatly enjoyed her multi-dimensional portal fantasy and first novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, I then struggled with her follow-up, The Once and Future Witches, an ambitious piece of storytelling and reframing of witchcraft and feminism that just didn’t land with me. However, with this novel Harrow spins the wheel again and we find ourselves with a successful take on the micro-genre of Southern Gothic Haunted House.
A tumbledown mansion on the edge of Eden, a seedy Kentucky mining town with notoriously bad luck, Starling House is off-limits to the locals. It was built in the nineteenth century by Eleanor Starling, author of a decidedly dark children’s book but also a suspected witch and murderer. Since her disappearance, a succession of wanderers have taken the family name, called it home for a time and then perished themselves.
Meanwhile in the present day, Opal lives in the town’s only motel with her teenage brother Jasper, thanks to a deal made with the owner by her wild child mother (deceased). Bright, but an orphan and social pariah with no prospects, her main motivation is to get Jasper out of Eden before it drags him down, like her and seemingly everyone else in the town.
And yet Opal dreams of Starling House and read Eleanor Starling’s work at an early age. So one day she finds herself at its door, meeting Arthur Starling, the house’s current owner and young guardian. To her surprise, she finds herself being offered a very well-paid cleaning job – the House needs a lot of practical and metaphorical care. Despite her suspicions, this is just what she needs to achieve her goal of getting Jasper into private school and out of town.
Once inside, she finds herself with more questions than answers: why does the building boast an extensive occult library and protective symbols and items from a hundred cultures? What lies past the locked cellar trapdoor? What duties does Arthur carry out as the warden of Starling House? And how can she account for the sneaking feeling that the house itself is alive?
Opal is not the only one curious about Starling House – while she grows closer to Arthur and the House with each visit, Elizabeth Baine, a decidedly sinister corporate investigator, manipulates, bribes and blackmails her into sharing what she knows about its secrets. Linked with the power-plant and mine-owning Gravely family who run Eden as their own fiefdom, her agenda runs much deeper than mineral rights, to the perilous secrets long-kept by Eleanor Starling and her descendants.
Much of the appeal of Starling House (the novel, not the mansion) rests on Opal, a walking, talking, self-sabotaging force of nature whose self-seeking and spiky exterior conceals someone who just can’t help doing the right thing. Small wonder Arthur’s response to her is one part bafflement to two parts increasing adoration. We spend a lot of time in Opal’s head in this novel so it’s important Harrow gets her right, which she very much does.
The setting is another of the novel’s strengths. Through an accumulation of detail from Eden’s past and present, as well as Eleanor Starling’s story (told from a number of different perspectives) we gradually uncover the story of a town beset by multiple original sins: slavery, the greed of the Gravelys and the exploitation of natural resources.
Where Harrow implicitly asks for the reader’s trust is in connecting Opal and her no-good rotten town with the mysteries of Starling House itself. Great though the presentation of the mansion is, I’m not sure this connection quite works if you think too hard about it or look too closely at the joints. It follows that this rift in the plot and its eventual resolution are the weakest points in the whole story.
That said, Starling House the book is a most enjoyable, atmospheric piece of contemporary fantasy writing. It’s great to rediscover Alix E. Harrow back at the top of her game. Highly recommended.
Tim Atkinson
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