Fireside Gothic by Andrew Taylor
The title is perfect; these are spine-tinglers that cry out to be read in the flickering light of a wood fire. In Broken Voices, set during the Christmas before the First World War, two lonely boys are left at school in the care of a dotty old teacher, who tells them weird tales about the local cathedral. The Scratch concerns an apparently perfect couple whose lives are overturned by a visit from Gerald’s nephew. Jack has been on active service in Afghanistan and has a scratch that refuses to heal; as the wound festers, the couple start to fall apart. The Leper House (my favourite) starts with a man driving away from the funeral of his sister. His car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and he finds a mysterious house — without giving anything away, the strength of the story lies in the man’s relationship with his dead sister, and Andrew Taylor’s evocation of the Suffolk coast is wonderfully atmospheric. Totally does what it says on the tin.
HarperCollins, 241pp; £12.99
Himself by Jess Kidd
In the summer of 1976 a handsome stranger called Mahony arrives in the west of Ireland. Mahony was raised in a brutal orphanage and one of the nuns there has just died, leaving him an envelope marked: “For when the child is grown.” The envelope contains a note and a photograph of a young girl — his mother. Her name was Orla, it emerges, and she lived in Mulderrig, Co Mayo. So Mahony travels to the town to try to find out what happened to her. Mulderrig is seething with secrets, and he soon realises that he’s seeing dead people — including a girl with her head bashed in and a former lover of his landlady, Mrs Cauley. This knowing old bird is wonderfully entertaining; a former actress who tells Mahony about “wicked” Orla’s strange disappearance. Yet if she’s dead, then why can’t he see her? The ghosts are not the main attraction in this delightful first novel; it is also a detective story, in which Mahony and Mrs C make an unlikely Holmes and Watson.
Canongate, 361pp; £12.99
The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine
Jacob, a poet, is in the waiting room of a crisis psychiatric clinic. “I was having hallucinations,” he explains, “hearing Satan’s voice again.” We hear it too — Satan and Death are discussing Jacob’s case, urging him to remember the torment he has tried to forget. Jacob finds that he can’t regret the fact that his mother was forced to become a prostitute; he has happy memories of growing up in a brothel. He then joined the San Francisco gay scene just as the Aids epidemic was at its height. The “you” that Jacob addresses during this long night is his dead partner. Six of his friends died over six months. “How could my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?” However, everyone else seems to have forgotten this horrible era, and the forgetting is at the heart of Jacob’s madness. Rabih Alameddine’s writing is beautiful, often deeply moving (especially if you’re of an age to have lost a friend in that tragedy), but it is also deliciously witty.
Corsair, 294pp; £18.99