The Whispering House

January 11, 2021
Brooks (The Orphan of Salt Winds) cooks up a spellbinding gothic story featuring a sinister country house. Aspiring poet Freya Lyell, 23, mourns the apparent death by suicide of her mercurial older sister, Stella, at 21, who jumped from a cliff not far from stately Byrne Hall in England’s West Country. Five years on, Freya and her father attend a cousin’s wedding on the grounds of the imposing house. After a few drinks and the glimpse of a mysterious man emerging from the cliff path, Freya wanders into the house’s front hall to discover a portrait of a girl who appears to be Stella. When she returns to inquire about the picture, she is lured into a web of dark intrigue spun by the house’s inhabitants: artist Cory Byrne, who remembers having Stella pose for him a week before her death, and Cory’s enigmatic mother, Diana. While there is never any doubt who the bad guys and good guys are, the yarn moves swiftly and with sufficient suspense to its predictable denouement, Brooks’s lean prose never getting in the way of the plot. This is an exquisitely creepy page-turner. Agent, Sarah Levitt, Aevitas Creative.

February 1, 2021
In a house as old and (apparently) stately as Byrne Hall, there are certain to be secrets behind locked doors. Freya Lyell's life has felt paused since her sister, Stella, committed suicide five years prior by throwing herself off the cliffs near Byrne Hall, an idyllic manor on the English coast. When Freya gets drunk at a cousin's wedding held on the estate's grounds (a somewhat insensitive wedding location, Freya believes), she stumbles on a portrait that eerily resembles her dead sister. Later, unable to get this portrait out of her mind, she leaves the routine of her young adult life in London (work, swim, home to dad) and heads back to Byrne Hall to try to find some answers. What she's met with, however, are not answers but an almost instantaneous happiness that feels off-kilter with the issues that keep circling in her thoughts--her sister's suicide, her mother's death when she was 5, and her ensuing troubled childhood. Bolstering this happiness is her whirlwind romance with would-be portrait artist Cory Byrne, who lives in Byrne Hall, his family estate, with his ailing mother and takes Freya as his all-consuming muse. But even in her newfound elation, a darkness--almost a morbidness--lingers uncomfortably close: "In every version I kiss him right back, and it's almost like the last scene in the movie--except that there's an old woman curled up on the bed, and her fingers are twitching restlessly on top of the sheets." When Brooks suddenly shifts the narrative back in time to when Stella was alive, the darkness bubbling beneath creaky floorboards begins to boil over. Brooks' elegant prose and artfully written protagonist keep this somewhat predictable thriller from feeling formulaic. Eerie, gripping, and macabre: a gothic romance for the contemporary age.

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February 15, 2021
Freya Lyell attends a wedding at Byrne Hall, where she finds herself just miles away from the rocky cliff where, years ago, the body of her sister Stella was found dead. When she drunkenly stumbles on a portrait of her sister in the dark, open spaces of Byrne Hall, Freya, shaken, is pulled into the world of those who live there: artist Cory and his ill mother, Diana. Brooks' novel is a quietly desperate tale of an old house and its secrets, and of manipulation and eerie cruelty. The Whispering House is atmospheric and creepy, and as needy, nostalgic Freya is pulled deeper and deeper into its shadows, the reader's worry for her grows--and, with it, the novel's suspense. Freya is haunted by words she wishes she could take back, the sister she lost, the love that never was, the hopes for the future that she couldn't attain; all of these materialize in the deep shadows and shifting portrait-eyes of Byrne Hall. Brooks has crafted a slow-simmering, psychological, gothic novel about grief and longing.

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