The Golden Key

An extraordinary, page-turning Gothic mystery set in the wilds of the Norfolk Fens from the BSFA-shortlisted author.
London, 1901. After the death of Queen Victoria the city heaves with the uncanny and the eerie. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms.
Samuel Moncrieff, recovering from a recent tragedy of his own, meets Helena Walton-Cisneros, one of London’s most reputed mediums. But Helena is not what she seems and she’s enlisted by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens.
But the Fens are a liminal land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. With locals that speak of devilmen and catatonic children found on the Broads, Helena finds the answer to the mystery leads back to where it started: Samuel Moncrieff.

Many thanks to Titan Books for a finished copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased opinion.

I’m a very simple woman. I see Gothic and a hint of the supernatural and I am there.

The Golden Key sounds like a perfect combination of ghosts and superstition and haunted buildings … and it was a good combination of these things, but it left some things to be desired.

The Golden Key is a haunting, atmospheric Gothic tale that artfully blends the real and the supernatural, with a mystery that grabbed me by the collar and dragged me along.

While I enjoyed the book, I think it’s going to demand a niche readership, because the writing style and the way the plot unfolds isn’t for everyone.

❧ This book is a prime example of great Gothic writing … which means you have to really like Gothic writing in order to enjoy this book.

That’s sort of the nasty caveat here, since it’s such a particular style, and this book feels much more like a classic Gothic novel. Which can be good or bad depending on how you feel about Gothic literature.

This book features:
✿ A dark, ominous atmosphere
✿ A complex, winding plot that unfolds little by little
✿ A very formal, almost dry writing style
✿ Beautiful, lush descriptions
✿ The fantastical blended with the real

There were plenty of elements that I could see not working for some readers, but they mostly all clicked well for me. I’ve always been a fan of classical Gothic, and this elicited the same feelings, but with a writing style that was more accessible and easier to read and breeze through.

❧ The mystery in this book is a slow burn that starts murky and unfurls little by little.

This isn’t a book that’s going to immediately grab you and force you to read. But about a quarter of the way through, the mystery really revved up, and I was hooked. There were so many twists and turns and new information added that I actually had no proper guesses as to what the resolution would be until right before it happened. I was definitely kept guessing!

❧ This book got dark fast and oh my gosh, I loved it so.

I mean, would you expect anything else from a Gothic novel? This is why I love the genre so much, and this book was no exception. It started with an air of death: Samuel has lost someone he cares about, and the country has lost a queen. There’s just this general haze of loss. From there, it takes some dark, twisting turns with seances, a spooky haunted manor, missing children, etc. There’s a pervasive atmosphere of dark foreboding that always had me waiting for the next monster lurking in the darkness.

❧ The women in this are fantastic, daring to be scientific and smart in a world that deems it unfit for their gender.

In case you hadn’t noticed, phew, yes, there is a lot of misogyny in this. It doesn’t even have the decency to be subtle. It’s just blatant, in your face, and often called out (to no avail, of course, given the time period, but still).

These women are unapologetically witty and good at what they do, especially Helena, who we spend the most time with. She knows exactly what her job requires, and she’s willing to do what she needs in order to solve the mystery and get results. I really enjoyed seeing all the different ways she played the game.

❧ You have to really pay attention when reading this, because there are brilliant little nuggets thrown in everywhere.

I actually love this the most when I’m reading books. I like digging around the narrative for little Easter eggs, and I feel very accomplished when I find them. This book is actually chock full of little treasures like that, and I appreciated how expertly it was done. Things that seemed insignificant in the beginning had new meaning by the middle of the book, as new facts came to light.

This book is based off of George MacDonald’s book The Golden Key, and it was really interesting how the themes of that were used. I’ve actually never read the book by MacDonald, but I don’t think doing so is necessary to enjoy this one, or at least I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything by not having read it. This book does a fine job summarizing the pertinent parts of that story. Perhaps you’d get more having read that, and maybe you’d recognize some more Easter eggs hidden in the text. I’m not sure.

❧ The descriptions in this book are so vivid and lush that I felt right there along with the characters, traipsing around the countryside.

The setting was one reason I was attracted to this book, and it’s really brought to life in these pages: the beauty and danger of the Fen, the eeriness of the abandoned ruins, the large expanse of space where anyone can get lost. It’s not written in purple prose, and I didn’t feel like the story was overly bogged down with descriptions to the detriment of the actual plot, but they painted a lovely picture of the Fens just the same.

❧ The story is told in a very meandering way, where it jumps back and forth between characters and points of view, and it takes a long time for them all to meet up and fully make sense.

This was a little hit or miss for me. In part, I thought it did a really good job of ramping up the mystery. We spend the most time with Helena, who is actively working on the mystery, and I adored her, so I was fine with that. The problem was that it was, at times, hard to follow, very choppy to keep head hopping, and sometimes hard to know when in the timeline things are taking place. It also takes a while for the points of view to meet up, so in the meantime, it feels very random without enough draw, because suddenly Eliza is just … there, and her role never felt all that concrete to me, and certainly not enough to warrant a whole perspective herself, as in depth as it was. Although, I’m not gonna lie … I was sort of low-key hoping that Eliza and Helena would end up together, two “spinsters” living their best lives together among all the books, doing as they please regardless of what society deems appropriate. This is a thing now in my head.

There was one timeline that sort of completely threw me for a loop as far as the way the story jumped around, and that was with the mediums.

I wasn’t entirely sure how it fit into the overall story. There were even some chapters that were transcripts of automatic writing from a medium, and I was a bit confused about what they meant and how they fit in. Maybe I missed something? It happens, and I wouldn’t be surprised. There was just a lot going on, and I didn’t always know how it fit together.

❧ The writing is very dry and felt distant, so I didn’t get a very good connection with any of the characters.

On Samuel’s part, I’m sure this is on purpose, as at least part of the mystery revolves around him. I was a little annoyed by this at first, but after getting a little into the story, I liked this, because I realized he was an unreliable narrator (I would’ve known if I’d, like, read the blurb? But pffft, reading things). So the distance with his character allowed him to remain more of an enigma.

I did feel like I knew more about Eliza and Helena, but it was all impersonal facts about the character rather than feeling like I knew them intimately, like their thoughts and hopes and dreams. Which was a shame, because these women were fantastic, and I definitely wanted to know them on a more personal level.

❧ The ending is very open, and for me, that’s my least favorite sort of ending.

This is for sure a me thing. I know some people like open endings, and they enjoy the what-ifs and the wondering and being able to imagine for themselves. But not me, no. I don’t mind a vague ending, but I prefer some sort of definitive structure to the ending, where I know what happened and why and to whom. That’s just my personal reading preference, but that meant that this ending felt a bit disappointing to me, because I was so invested in the mystery and didn’t feel like it was satisfactorily wrapped. No, I didn’t expect to get all the answers (because that would defeat the eerie supernatural atmosphere), but it was a little too open for me personally and without enough concrete answers.

What are some of your favorite Gothic works?

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