Is it fair to describe Will Maclean’s Solace House as an off-campus novel? It arrives as one of the year’s most anticipated works of horror, following on from Maclean’s debut, the widely admired lockdown hit The Apparition Phase (2020).
Solace House contains themes that will be familiar to fans of stories centering on young people navigating the first tentative steps of adulthood amid the romantic and existential tribulations of their peers; friendships and relationships coalescing in an environment where drugs, booze, and bad sex are always proximate. However, the bulk of the action takes place far from bars and threadbare student accommodation.
This is somewhere that we’ll come to learn is the “thin place” – a porous boundary between the corporeal world and realms parallel to our own that may be accessible to the right minds, aided by the right chemicals. Maclean’s novel boasts porous boundaries of its own, forming a meeting point among gothic fiction, cosmic horror, and what at times feels like a coming-of-age story.
Solace House opens as Alex Lane, the central protagonist, finds himself marooned at his halls of residence after the end of his first year at an unnamed university. With a tragic event in his past that he refers to cryptically as The Last Day, rendering travelling home for the summer impossible, he finds himself penniless and lovelorn as his crush, Amethyst, hailing from a higher social echelon, absconds to Asia for the holidays with a mutual friend.
It is 1993, and Maclean’s decision to set his story in this time period feels instructive. Where The Apparition Phase dealt with the lost futures and”the ‘haunted generation” of the 1970s, situating his latest during the early 1990s places it at a similar social inflection point.
Just as the 1970s marked the last gasp of the Keynesian postwar economic consensus before the Thatcher and Reagan administrations unleashed the merciless neoliberalism that continues to torment us, the 1990s represent the last analog decade. During this time, in Britain at least, there remained something resembling a welfare state, including not-insignificant government support for higher education. It’s just about possible to imagine that a university would pay students a livable wage to spend a summer clearing out two vast properties ahead of their renovation as new student accommodation, one of the plot’s key conceits.
Maclean has been open about the influence of hauntology on his fiction. The ultimate irony that it was a supposedly socialist Labour government that swept away so much of the social safety net that just about still existed as the story begins is dealt with later in the novel. It represents another rupture, another haunted present, that characterizes his work.
Desperate for income, Alex consults a supercilious student welfare officer, who provides him with a most unlikely solution: a decrepit building in the nearby countryside named Marshlands, a former asylum, has recently been purchased by the university and needs to be cleared out so it can be repurposed as new halls of residence. A group of students has already set to work and, as luck would have it, one of them has dropped out, leaving a space for Alex.
We are soon introduced to the team; there’s the fastidious leader Jilly Cowie (dressed, we’re told, “exactly how you’d expect someone called ‘Jilly Cowie’ to be dressed”), Leo (a dreadlocked ravehead keen to philosophize about the coming age of kindness), Malcolm (hedonistic and glamorous), Clive (a boorish postgraduate with a sideline in abrasive wit), Helen (a judgmental Christian possibly abandoned by her parents for the entire summer), Ruth (a sardonic goth), the mysterious Adam (creepy and withdrawn, also the only other inhabitant at Alex’s halls) and finally Ella (flame-haired and free-spirited).
The property adjacent to Marshlands that comprises the meat of the story. The imposing mansion, Solace House, has also been purchased and requires a similar clearout. Easier said than done; the building was the home of a recluse named Edwin Flayne, a compulsive hoarder who crammed his vast home full of all kinds of detritus. That’s not the half of it. Behind Solace House lie the ruins of a maze that leads to an idyllic clearing, containing the entrance to an ancient cavern covered in spirals and housing an abyss that extends beyond torchlight… You get the idea.
It isn’t long before it’s evident that something strange is going on. A red-haired woman is glimpsed on the grounds before disappearing. A key, seemingly thrown from the ether, hits Helen while clearing out the main hallway. A hidden telephone repeatedly rings from somewhere deep within the building.
Alex and Ella’s budding romance is kindled by their fascination with the discovery of Flayne’s journals, which makes clear his belief that the house resides on a fault line where higher realms of being are accessible via the right combination of arcane magic and liberal doses of psychedelics. Flayne was driven to find his beloved mother, whom he believed had escaped to this “exalted realm”, only to discover it was already occupied by a “Mad God” whom Flayne went to great lengths to imprison.
This is all conveyed in prose characterized by an excitable, breathless tone that lends itself to easy consumption and often invokes a sense of wonderment. Characters stumble upon something new every few pages as we reach the crux of the text, pausing to alert each other in hushed tones, “Guys, take a look at this.” We’re carried along by such enthusiasm and enthralled by the vivid descriptions of the world that’s been conjured.
Maclean admits that the story is influenced by the recent vogue of liminal spaces and that he’s developed a fondness for the groundbreaking Backrooms web series. He uses these references to telling effect in describing the progressively disturbing interiors of Solace House as the students’ grip on their situation begins to slip. What can’t be denied is Maclean’s way with constructing a compelling narrative. The novel comes in at about 500 pages, but like the best popular fiction, it is imbued with a cinematic propulsiveness that drags the reader along in its wake. It speeds by in a flash, even when the pace dips slightly – you’ll read it in no time.
Alex, the narrator and protagonist, is the most fully-realized character, though, absent the traumatic event in his childhood, he’s something of a blank slate. Infatuated with Amethyst at the outset of the story, his longing to make enough money to follow her on her travels and impress her provides him with the impetus to work at Marshlands to begin with. He finds in the group a sense of friendship he’s been keenly deprived of and in Ella a partner-in-crime as fascinated by the mystery of the house and its former occupant as he is.
Ella arrives late to the operation and shortly after meeting Alex, in a rather maladroit chunk of exposition, reveals that Amethyst and her friend merely strung him along for the past year. Alex deals with the emotional fallout from this revelation a little too quickly, perhaps, conveniently leaving the door ajar for a rebound. Their romance happens naturally, and we are mercifully spared any detailed attempts at describing their nights together. They fuck, they drink, they smoke, their pillow talk occasionally advances the plot – that’s all that’s needed for a story like this.
If the remaining characters are sketched somewhat cursorily, they are, if nothing else, verbose, given plenty of time to philosophize and share what drove them to seek solace for the summer. The exception is Adam, the story’s antagonist, who remains a disturbingly taciturn presence until the appearance of Ella and a deeper connection to Solace House provides the prompt for menacing changes in his behaviour. He fixates on the new arrival and retreats to his room, where chanting can occasionally be overheard. We learn – again, rather awkwardly via Ella – that he, too, has a traumatic event in his past that has disrupted his life. The house and Flayne’s secrets may provide an unprecedented way for him to heal.
What aids the story’s kinetic power is the dialogue, which is often funny and quip-heavy (A character wondering aloud what might have killed the 101-year-old Flayne is told, “Water skiing accident. Jesus Christ, he probably just sat up too fast.”). The casual cruelty alternating with affection (I believe it’s called “banter”) that characterizes nascent friendships is rendered convincingly here.
There are times, however, when Maclean’s experiences in writing children’s television trip him up. Variations on exclamations such as “Well spotted, Alex!” crop up here and there, occasionally reading like Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. (Note to any commissioning editors who might be reading this: I will pay with my own money for the chance to write that novel.) There is also the odd clanger, such as “Leo, drugs are interesting, but people who know lots about drugs tend to be the most boring people on Earth.'”People say things like that, but they don’t say it like that, in such a declarative fashion. It can be frustrating.
These are trivial defects in an otherwise hugely entertaining novel. Before reading both The Apparition Phase and Solace House, I wasn’t aware that I was in search of horror informed by preoccupations as diverse as Usborne Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown (1970), The Backrooms, Shirley Jackson, and Donna Tartt. Will Maclean has melted these constituent parts down and developed a unique, compelling voice in modern speculative fiction. His stories don’t end where one would expect. Solace House is an interesting place to lose yourself in. Enjoy the trip.