The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
My rating: ★★★✰✰ (3.6 stars)
An eerie and elegantly written novel that thrums with increasing suspense. Waters’ masterfully renders past times and The Little Stranger shows that she can faithfully write non-Victorian settings. The novel’s vivid atmosphere lacks the passion which we can find in other stories by Waters.
This novel is rather slow paced: Dr. Faraday’s befriends the Ayreses who soon reveal themselves to be struggling. Their financial situation and poor reputation is not the only thing that bothers them. Something ‘sinister’ is occuring in the crumbling mansion they live in, something that seems set on haunting them. While I found Faraday’s narration compelling, I was never really taken by him or the other characters. They might be fully-fleshed out people but their vigourless conversations didn’t make them particularly fascinating.
It is the constant tension that makes the storyline so gripping. The ambiguous characters and strange occurrences are the best aspects of the novel. Waters’ writing is –as per usual– simply terrific. There is something refined about the way in which she writes, that complements the setting of her story.
Not her best but a solid read for fans of Gothic fiction.
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