“An English Ghost Story” by Kim Newman
A dysfunctional British nuclear family seek a new life away from the big city in the sleepy Somerset countryside. At first their new home, The Hollow, seems to embrace them, creating a rare peace and harmony within the family. But when the house turns on them, it seems to know just how to hurt them the most—threatening to destroy them from the inside out.
Trigger Warning: Eating Disorders
What can I say? Sometimes you pick up a book because you know the author’s name through his work in another field, only to discover that being a renowned film critic doesn’t mean you know how human beings talk or think.
An English Ghost Story is a novel of interesting ideas, poorly handled. There is a lot in here that could have made a fascinating story. The nature of hauntings and of ghosts. A psychological story of the modern family. An old-fashioned tale of people trying to inhabit a place they don’t belong. Unfortunately, Newman doesn’t deliver on any of these.
I began this book feeling it was heading somewhere interesting. By about halfway through, the only thing really keeping me reading was the promise of getting to the end so there would be no more to read.
The opening isn't bad. taking just enough time to set up her personalities and dynamics before dropping them in the location that began influencing them. We know enough to know who each character is, and how the way they are acting after moving to The Hollow isn't natural for them.
The is clear by about a third of the way through that Newman's weakness is writing believable characters.
The first big problem is his decision to make all four equal protagonists. Rather than picking one and seeing the story through their eyes, the point-of-view jumps between them. Each section moves to someone else, meaning that everything that's been built up is lost. None of the four have enough time to grow and develop.
The second is the fact that none of the characters feel like actual human beings. Each one never grows out of cliche, none of them are sympathetic, and none of them think or act in a way that feels natural. And because of that, it's impossible to root for them, or even care.
If Newman had picked one of the characters and focused on them, it might have worked. Or at least worked better.
While the opening had promise, by the end I was literally looking at the pages in near disgust. Both for the writing, and one specific point that is just so tone deaf I still can't quite believe what I’d read.
For a while, it actually seems like Newman might have had an interesting climax looking out of the darkness, but it was not to be. Instead, we have each character essentially just decide to stop allowing the bad things to happen. This is then followed by a page and half of one of them explaining exactly what had been happening removing any interest of mystery from the reader. And there is no reason they suddenly know any of this, of course. Then a random background character - only mentioned in passing until now - appears, for the sole purpose of the family telling them to go away in what is clearly intended to be a symbolic moment of moving on from the past.
But that’s just a bad ending. I've read those before. But would you like to know the moment that a literally couldn't believe I was reading?
Towards the end, we are told one of the characters is able to free themselves because of their strong willpower. How did they get this willpower, you ask? Well, because they suffered from anorexia in the past, of course. And as forcing yourself not to eat takes so much willpower, this was how she had learned the skills necessary to survive.
The fuck?
Ultimately, there was a good book in here somewhere. Newman clearly knows his stuff, horror-wise. But horror stories don't work if we don't care about the characters, or the characters don't act like real people. And that appears to be the author's weakness. He just can't write people.
