Rating: ★★★☆☆
Genre: Mystery & Thrillers
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing/Arcade Publishing
Publication Date: May 1, 2018
Disclaimer: I received a free ARC copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
In The Dead House, Billy O’Callaghan delivers a masterfully written story that will have you up late at night questioning if there’s something out there, lurking in the dark.
“Sometimes when the wind lifts, the dead still sing.” ~ The Dead House Dedication
Mike is a successful art dealer in London, who met Maggie through his job. Now, Maggie has become more like a little sister to him, which is why he does everything in his power to see that she’s happy and healing after coming out of an abusive relationship which has left her scarred—physically and emotionally. When Maggie decides to buy an isolated cottage in Allihies, Mike thinks it may be a mistake, but is easily taken in by her excitement and fervor.
To celebrate the new house, Maggie gathers a small group of friends for a housewarming: Mike; Liz, a poet; and Allison, a museum curator. For an added bit of fun, to go with their alcohol, they pull out an Ouija board. What they end up channeling is powerful and dark, a spirit known as “The Master.” He reveals his harrowing past to them, during the height of the potato famine, where he killed a girl and then himself. Everyone parts ways the next day, shaken up and scared but ready to move forward just the same.
Except for Maggie. As the others hear from her less and less, they become worried. When Mike finally goes down to check on her, both she and her artwork have become unrecognizable, and it seems one of her housewarming guests never went home: The Master.
☙ O’Callaghan is a wordsmith of the rarest kind. His prose is beautiful. He doesn’t simply write scenes; he paints them. Even with that, though, the writing is accessible. It’s not haughty, but easy to follow. There were sentences I found myself reading two or three times, just because I loved them so much and they elicited such a strong response. It’s really hard to find a writer that perfectly balances evocative prose and story, without being too bogged down by either where the other suffers, but O’Callaghan accomplishes just that, which makes the book a pleasure to read.
☙ I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going in, but the author lays it all out in the prologue. “This is the truth as I know it to be, this is what I remember,” the main character, Mike, says. Then, following that, he asks the reader a single important question: “Do you believe in ghosts?” The whole tone of the prologue sets the tone of the book really well and immediately had me hooked for the long haul.
☙ I thought the use of color and light was quite clever and beautiful. Color and light, in many ways throughout the book, are used to set scenes. In fact, that’s what first drew Mike to Maggie and her artwork. “You painted the light,” he says. “You realised what mattered most in what you saw.” As the tone of the book shifts, and as Maggie and her art changes, the colors and the light in the scenes change, too. I thought this was a fantastic, but subtle, way to show how the story progresses.
☙ The ending! OMG THAT ENDING. I won’t say anything because spoilers (and just so you know, it’s killing me), but the ending was brilliant and creepy and leaves you with lasting tingles running up and down your spine. It’s also open-ended, which makes me wonder if maybe there’s a chance that the Dead House, or at least the characters in it, will be revisited again soon. But oh yes, this had pretty much the perfect ending. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.
☙ This isn’t really Maggie’s story, as the synopsis might lead one to believe, but Mike’s, and I’m not all that fond of Mike. Sure, Maggie’s story is wrapped into it, but her story is really only maybe 30% – 50% of the book. The rest is Mike’s story, and Mike is a crappy character, in my opinion. I found him entirely unrelatable. In his narrative, Mike implies that he’s fairly average. In terms of finance, he uses descriptions like “comfortable without actually challenging the threshold of serious wealth,” and describes his business as having been “relatively lucrative,” but that, ultimately, he ended up with a “modest definition of financial security.” However, when Maggie calls wanting a loan of 30,000, he doesn’t bat an eye to give it to her. He also thinks nothing of it when that loan goes up to 50,000 and doesn’t even consider whether she can pay that amount back and seems extremely flippant about it. Which tells me two things. First, he’s got enough liquid capital where throwing away 50,000 is nothing (which I assume means, really, he has over 100,000 in liquid assets), and two, we have very different definitions of what it means to live comfortably and have a modest amount of financial security. Since this happened early on in the book, it immediately drove a wedge between me and the main character. That is not where the wedge stopped, though, but they were little things and, ultimately, my personal opinion. So while others may entirely find Mike a relatable character, I did not, which made reading his story difficult, because I really didn’t care about him. I didn’t dislike him, but I was very indifferent towards his character.
☙ The plot is actually mostly romance, or that’s what it feels like. The budding “thing” growing between Mike and Allison, both up there in years, ended up taking first string over the actual mystery of Dead House and The Master. To the point where if this had been branded as a romance, I wouldn’t have felt cheated, but I did feel a bit cheated to read so much romance in a mystery/thriller. It wasn’t innocuous. There were whole large sections where Maggie was never mentioned, and which revolved around either Mike’s quotidian lifestyle or his deciding whether or not he and Allison could actually become an item. I mean, it really stuck out in small moments, like Allison staying the night and cooking him breakfast, and it goes into detail about what she’s wearing and exactly what’s on his breakfast plate and how he feels about that . . . and why am I reading this? Where are my ghosts? What’s happening with Maggie? I care more about that than the eggs.
☙ The narrative style drives me crazy, but I’m mentioning it also partly because some people may love this style. And for those of you who do, well, here you go! This book is about 90% tell and 10% show. Now, parts of this are narration by Mike, which I don’t count among the bad because the narration (such as the prologue) actually works fantastically. However, the rest is just recounting a series of events that happened to the characters. I’d even go so far as to say the first 15% or so of the book (not counting the prologue) could be cut and it would lose nothing. It’s a rehashing of Mike’s life (which I couldn’t care less about, as I have no reason, at this point, to care about Mike) and eventually, how he meets Maggie and Maggie’s life up until she buys the Dead House. For me, telling isn’t engaging. I want to live in a scene. The best scenes in this book are the ones that are happening in real time, so to speak, like the first encounter with the Ouija board (not so much about the Master as, again, that’s more telling than anything) or the end. These scenes ground me there with Mike and create a sense of immediacy and urgency and, to me at least, convey better the emotion and anxiety and fear. Being told someone’s afraid isn’t the same as seeing their terror.
☙ The Dead House itself had me confused, and I’m actually disappointed that this wasn’t built up more or made a big deal of. There were signs from the realtor who sold Maggie the property that she wouldn’t want it, but they all related to the condition it was in more than anything. Even Mike’s objections to it were based on the condition and the isolation more than anything. However, towards the end of the book, it seems the house itself had quite a reputation in the nearby town, but this was never mentioned anywhere else. It feels like there’s a whole side to this story that could have been expanded and deepened, and if it had done so, this could have easily been one of my favorite reads. I’m almost disappointed that it wasn’t and that so much time was spent on the romance and other aspects instead of building up the mystery that was already in the story.
Even though it may seem like there was more bad than good in this review, I thoroughly enjoyed The Dead House. There were absolutely some parts that were slower, which I would have skimmed through for any other author, but O’Callaghan’s writing style is so beautiful and poignant that I didn’t dare skip, just in case I missed something. This was a short, quick read, but an enjoyable one, so I’d recommend checking it out anyway. Especially if there ends up being a sequel. (Please, let there be a sequel.)
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