Luckenbooth
by Jenni FaganPublished by: Pegasus Books on January 4, 2022
Genres: Adult, Gothic, Horror
Pages: 352
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Rating:
A bold, haunting, and startlingly unique novel about the secrets we leave behind and the places that hold them long after we are gone, a “quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest.” (Irvine Welsh)
There are stories tucked away on every floor of 10 Luckenbooth Close.
1910, Edinburgh. Jessie MacRae has been sent to a tenement building by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents—a curse that will last for the rest of the century.
Over nine decades, 10 Luckenbooth Close bears witness to emblems of a changing world outside its walls. An infamous madam, a spy, a famous Beat poet, a coal miner who fears daylight, a psychic: these are some of the residents whose lives are plagued by the building's troubled history in disparate, sometimes chilling ways. The curse creeps up the nine floors as an enraged spirit world swells to the surface, desperate for the true horror of the building's longest kept secret to be heard.
Luckenbooth is a bold, haunting, and dazzlingly unique novel about the stories and secrets we leave behind—and the places that hold them long after we are gone.
Content Tags:
Perfect for readers who want:
- Dark, Gothic horror.
- Stream-of-conscious prose.
- Relatable characters who live on the fringe of society.
- Interesting paranormal mystery storyline.
- Jumping timeline that comes together little by little.
- Characters who refuse to stay in the lane society tells them they belong in.
Many thanks to Pegasus Books and JeanBookNerd for an ARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.
After I read the blurb for this book, I was absolutely hooked and knew I just had to pick this book up! It sounded like a horror thriller mystery, and I was definitely up for that. Unfortunately, the blurb is a little bit misleading, and if you’re expecting that, you’re doomed to be disappointed. Instead, it’s an ode to a classic Gothic novel with a bit of a Scottish spin.
Luckenbooth is a dark, twisty Gothic novel with haunting prose, characters existing on the fringe of society, and a mystery that comes together little by little.
As I said, this book wasn’t quite what I had expected, which meant it was hard to get into. Once it got going, though, I was completely invested in the mystery and wanted to know what was going to happen! Like many Gothic novels, this one is for fans of the genre but will likely not appeal to those who aren’t accustomed to the heavy prose and stream-of-conscious type writing. For readers who do, though, this book is sure to be a trip!
Luckenbooth is a story told with multiple timelines, from a total of nine perspectives: starting from the first floor of the building and working its way up through them as time passes.
Not gonna lie, I’m usually not a fan of multiple timelines, because I have a hard time keeping them separate. However, Fagan writes characters that are so distinct that I had no problems at all here. The jumps in time are apparent. Each character is struggling with separate issues that fit their time period, such as the mentions of World War II, etc. Despite taking place in one location (that is, the Luckenbooth building), Fagan clearly roots the reader in a wider world that is facing its own struggles and which influences each of the characters.
The multiple timelines make sense in this book, because each person influences another, and they’re all ultimately influenced by the first character, the daughter of the Devil. I don’t think each perspective necessarily needed to be split up in two chapters each, rather than just progressing through each stage in a chunk, but as I said, they were distinct enough characters that it was still easy to follow. I do suspect that having the perspectives divided up this way increased the suspense, though, so there’s that!
— Aye. There is an order to things on the island though. As soon as someone dies you snap open the window to let the spirit out, then close it again so it doesn’t come back in. Then you throw a blanket on the mirror so they can’t stay and preen themselves. Spirits are vain creatures. You tip over all the kitchen chairs so the spirit cannot sit and refuse to leave like a child in a huff!
— What else?
She is rapt now.
— You stop the clock at the time of death.
— Why?
— The dead’s time is done, time won’t move on for them again.
In case you somehow missed it in the blurb, the book does, indeed, open with the first perspective being from the daughter of Satan. And what an interesting perspective it is!
If that didn’t immediately grab your attention, I’m not sure there’s much help for you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That’s definitely what made me want to pick this book up! I was interested in what direction Fagan would take this character, and I wasn’t disappointed. Jessie is both human and devil, a balance of both. She could go either way, though. She has the power to be like her father . . . but should she? Especially knowing the things her father did to her family. It’s quite a moral dilemma, and I appreciated the way Fagan portrayed it.
Each of the characters is struggling with something, most having to do with the fact that they exist on the fringe of society, doing things that society tells them is wrong or immoral.
In some cases, there is definitely an argument that could be made that it is immoral, like a woman who enjoys killing. The point, though, is that it’s “wrong” in this setting because she’s a woman joining the war force . . . not because she enjoys killing.
This is the case for many of the characters. There’s a “sexual deviant” who participates in orgies and hangs out with homosexuals. There’s a scientist who takes his work with bones a little too seriously. There’s a man who’s being battered and abused by his wife. There’s a homeless woman. All in all, I think this is the sort of story that is absolutely best told be these unique individuals, and I thought it was an extremely unique perspective to take. One that makes sense if the center focus of your book is the devil’s daughter!
As should every aspirational killing machine.
I’ll do what I’m told.
Whatever it is—no matter how dangerous.
I’m motivated by the killing, though—let’s be clear on that.
I like dressmaking, yes, but I’d rather raise a gun.
Are there any heroic dressmakers?
There are bound to be countless heroic seamstresses in the world.
The beginning is a little slow to get into as it sets up the setting and scenario. However, as the story gets going, I really enjoyed the way things started to connect and come together. Even though the story takes place with different characters in different times, each section connects to the previous ones in some way.
I absolutely love this sort of writing, where you really need to pay attention for the little Easter eggs dropped along the way. While it’s true that a character from the second chapter may fall out all of a sudden in Part 2, when the perspectives switch and jump forward in time, that doesn’t mean they don’t come up again from someone else’s perspective, commenting on what happened. Sometimes the perspectives within a part even crossed and aligned in unique ways. I always get excited when a previous character is name-dropped in an unexpected way!
The skeleton is going into a cabinet downstairs. I became obsessed with him. Two hundred and five bones. The skull alone had fourteen major bones. My favorites: temporal bone, zygomatic bone, palatine bone, parietal, sphenoid, vomer, pterygoid. I have built a skeleton horse so good he could win the damn Derby. My horse has evolved over 55 million years! They carry foals for eleven months and that four-legged elegance comes out walking and whinnying and running from day one. Don’t tell me we are the most evolved species, we are just the most upright ones—with irrational levels of delusion.
They should put horses in charge.
I am sure it is a glitch of evolution that we are dominant.
I simply couldn’t end this review without calling attention to this fabulous quote about writing. Because I’m biased.
But it really is a marvelous quote! One of the character’s chapters deals with philosophy, basically, and sometimes some far-out there ideas and theories. If I’m honest, this chapter felt a little like an unnecessary fluff chapter, and I mostly skimmed it, since I thought it was the weakest chapter plot-wise in the book. Quote-wise, though, it was filled with some good ones!
There’s about 1,000% more sex in this book than I was expecting. Which, if I’m honest, I was expecting very little.
This isn’t necessarily a sticking point rather than a mismatch of expectations. It’s also something that would be difficult to get across in a blurb or something. However, for myself personally, being as uninterested in reading about sex as I am and having expected a mystery thriller, this was a bit of a letdown. I find sex in books boring, so I was surprised that almost every other chapter has some sort of fairly graphic sex scene. While I appreciated the diversity and acceptance (of kinks, of different preferences, of sex-positive messages in general), it just isn’t for me.
That being said, the sex in this book is wonderfully sex positive and accepting. So if sex is your thing? You’ll find a refreshing lack of judgment in this book.
About Jenni Fagan
Jenni Fagan is an award-winning novelist, poet, screenwriter and artist - she has published several fiction novels and poetry collections, and her work has been translated into numerous languages to great critical acclaim worldwide. Jenni has been on multiple award lists including becoming a Granta Best of Young British Novelist - a once in a decade accolade - for her debut The Panopticon. Her first two fiction novels received the front cover of The New York Times Book Review, who described her as “the Patron Saint of Literary Street Urchins.”
She has written for The Independent, Marie Claire and the New York Times, and been on lists for Desmond Elliott, Encore, James Tait Black, Sunday Times Short Story Award, BBC International Short Story Prize among others, and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has concluded a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2020, becoming a Dr. of Philosophy, and has a vast body of photography and other artworks that she intends to collate and exhibit at some point. She is the current Poetry Lecturer at Strathclyde University.
Jenni grew up in the local authority care system for 16 years, before spending several years in homeless accommodation, she has moved over forty-five times and spent her teens and early twenties playing in punk and then grunge bands. She has been a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow in Grez, France, a Gavin Wallace Fellow as Poet in Residence at Summerhall for a year where she engraved poetry onto bones and installed her poems around the building, also a University of Edinburgh Writer in Residence, Arvon Tutor and she has worked with young people, blind and visually impaired writers, people in prison or secure facilities, among other vulnerable groups.
Jenni has held residencies at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, writing several of her poetry collections there, it is her favourite place to read and she considers it one of her literary homes.
She is working on several projects across the page and screen.
—Giveaway is open to International. | Must be 13+ to Enter
– 5 Winners will receive a Copy of LUCKENBOOTH by Jenni Fagan.
– 1 Winner will receive a $20 Amazon Gift Card
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