Tag Archives: ghost story

Darkmere – Helen Maslin

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I love a ghost story, especially if it takes place in a creepy castle on a windswept British coastline. Helen Maslin’s YA novel Darkmere offers readers two stories, one more successful than the other.

Seventeen-year-old Kate has been invited to Darkmere for the summer holidays by Leo, the boy she has a bit of a crush on. Darkmere is a castle he’s inherited, although he suggests “it isn’t a posh castle. It’ll be in a shit state because no one’s lived there for years. But it’s still a castle. And best of all it’s supposed to be haunted.”

Kate agrees to join Leo and his friends Beano, Hat-Man Dan and his girlfriend Lucie (who is only allowed to go if there will be another girl) and Jackson. The castle turns out to be remote and without any modern comforts or access to the Internet.

Darkmere Castle was built in 1825 by George Francis St Cloud as a wedding present for his young bride, Elinor. Tragically, Elinor took her own life during the second year of her marriage, and local legend has it that she died cursing her husband and his male heirs.

It is Elinor’s story that makes up the other part of the story. We learn about how she comes to be St Cloud’s bride and what her life is like when she arrives at Darkmere. As we learn more about her story – and it’s definitely the more interesting of the two narratives – things start to go sideways for the teens in the modern setting.

Maslin’s story, while not particularly scary, is atmospheric and filled with the requisite secret passages, strange sightings, and things that go bump in the night. I could have done without Kate’s story, really, although I guess without her arrival things at Darkmere would never have been stirred up.

The Whistling – Rebecca Netley

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Rebecca Netley’s debut novel The Whistling has all the necessary ingredients for an old-fashioned ghost story: an isolated location, a crumbling manor, unexplained occurrences, and plenty of things that go bump in the night.

It is 1860 and 24-year-old Elspeth Swansome arrives on the remote Scottish island of Skelthsea. She has been hired by Miss Gillies to look after her niece, Mary.

Iskar, Miss Gillies’ home, sits on the top of a hill. It is “a house larger than the others” remote and casting “a long shadow beneath which gorse and scrub shivered in the autumn chill.” Iskar was once beautiful, but is now showing signs of age and disrepair. It feels, to the reader and surely to Elspeth, dark and claustrophobic.

Elspeth’s young charge, Mary, has not spoken in months – not since the death of her twin brother William. There was also some scandal with the last nanny, Hettie, who ran off in the night with her lover. In addition, Mary’s mother – Miss Gillies’ sister – has recently died. All these tragedies strike a chord with Elspeth as she has also had some personal tragedy in her own life.

It doesn’t take long for things to get going. There are the requisite menacing characters, including Greer, a maid in the house who seems to hate Elspeth on sight and Ailsa, a woman from town who tells her that “All is not well at Iskar.” She’s got that right.

Elspeth hears humming in the halls, finds weird stones wrapped in human hair, sees shadows. Sometimes she finds Mary staring off into space and muttering to herself in a language no one can understand – even though she doesn’t speak to anyone else. Things get so creepy for Elspeth that she decides she is going to go back to the mainland, but in the end she can’t do it because of her growing affection for Mary.

Things get creepy for Mary, but unfortunately things didn’t get creepy for me. I mean – I guess I like my “horror” a little more horrific. This is an atmospheric book and might actually make a good movie, but it’s not scary.

There is a mystery at the centre of The Whistling. Although it’s not really my type of book, it was easy to read and entertaining enough for the kind of book it was. I suspect people who like their horror a little on the “lite” side, will likely really enjoy this book.

My version of the book, published by Harper Collins, has 377 pages…but the margins are wide and the font is huge – not sure what that was about. In addition, Netley had a writing quirk that drove me a little batty: “As I studied her features”; “As we walked”; “As I explained in my correspondence”. This is, I understand, a 100% personal pet peeve, but it did drive me a little batty. Otherwise, the writing is fine.

Easy to read, but nothing new.