Maud Drennan is a care worker and also a rather unwilling psychic, which makes her the ideal person to take on Cathal Flood, a bitter old eccentric and the bane of the local authority. Flood has a habit of terrorising his carers and Maud is his last hope. He lives at Brindlemere, a grade II listed mansion, crammed with all the rubbish he has hoarded over the years.
And rubbish in such quantities is scary; we know that from countless documentaries about people who are unable to throw anything away. Flood’s house stinks, it is overrun with semi-feral cats and God knows what else. Maud bravely goes in with her bin bags and the reeking old man suddenly appears, gazing down at her from the top of a heap of old carpet tiles like a tattered, vengeful bird. He tries shrieking abuse at her, but Maud is not to be put off, and the two of them embark on a cautious friendship. “You have a beautiful set of eyes,” he tells her. “The brown of a newly split conker.”
There is a son, Dr Gabriel Flood, whom the old man loathes. Maud comes across a photograph of Gabriel as a child, standing beside a little girl — but her face has been obliterated by a burn mark. Who is she and what happened to her? Why does Maud keep finding photos with burnt-off faces? She peels away layers of history, aided (sometimes) by several invisible saints and Renata, her agoraphobic, transgender landlady.
Jess Kidd’s first novel, Himself, was shortlisted for all kinds of gongs, including a nod from the Crime Writers’ Association — she is part of a wave of younger novelists who don’t see why they should be confined to just one genre. Her imagination is vivid, and the storyline of The Hoarder is as cluttered as the house itself, with saints, ghosts, ancient mysteries, disembodied childish laughter and every sort of bell and whistle. Her descriptions of the cairns of crap are brilliant, even occasionally poetic — the lino at Brindlemere is “patterned with brown lozenges like ancient orderly bloodstains” — but this comic and disturbing novel is driven by secrets that are only too real, and pervaded by the stench of ancient guilt. The supernatural elements are not nearly as scary as the hard truth about the past, and guilty humans are far more dangerous than ghosts.
The Hoarder by Jess Kidd, Canongate, 346pp, £14.99