I saw on social media that a friend of mine was reading this classic ghost story by Sarah Waters, and since I was between audiobooks at the moment, I decided to join her. I read Fingersmith several years ago, and while I didn’t love it, I did enjoy it and I can’t deny that the writing was really good.
I can’t remember who narrated the audiobook of The Little Stranger, but he did a good job and I would recommend it. The story is told in first person by a doctor in England who becomes close to the local squire and his family. The book starts with the main character, Dr. Faraday, talking about his first visit to Hundreds House, the old, grand house belonging to the local squire and his family when he was just a child. His mom worked in the house and let her son inside for some reason when he was there on a school trip or something. He wasn’t supposed to go inside, but his mom snuck him in and he took advantage of the opportunity by prying off a plaster acorn from one of the fireplaces because he loved the house so much he wanted a piece of it.
Years later, both his parents are dead and he’s a doctor. He’s called out to Hundreds because the maid has complained of a stomach illness and they want to make sure they aren’t held responsible if she dies. Dr. Faraday discovers she’s perfectly healthy and calls her on it. Her only excuse is that there’s “something evil” in the house. Dr. Faraday dismisses her ramblings as the superstition of an uneducated person and promises not to tell the family she’s really healthy on the condition she stay in bed for one day and then go back to work.
Since he came “all the way out there” (I’m not sure it’s ever specified how far the house is from his home/office, but since those grand old houses tended to be out in the country, I suppose it’s feasible to assume he had to travel at least several miles to get there), the family invites him to stay and have tea with them. Caroline, sister to the current squire, gives him a bit of a tour of the house, but most of it is shut up, since they can no longer afford to maintain it in all its splendor.
The book takes place in the late 1940s, so we’re talking the very end of the aristocracy as the world knew it, and that plays a pretty big part in the ghost story. What’s more spooky than a crumbling old mansion standing testament to a bygone era?
The current squire Roderick (Rod) Ayres is up to his eyeballs in debt and struggling (and failing) to hold everything together. He lives in the old house with his mother and sister, and while his mother says her husband never would have let things fall into such a state, she’s clearly failing to acknowledge the fact that society had changed in ways that no longer supported the aristocracy.
Dr. Faraday is shocked and dismayed to find that Rod and Caroline view the house as more of a burden than a privilege. Being of the working class, he has no conception of the amount of money and work required to maintain such a place – he can only see the glamor (or, at least, what used to be the glamor) of the old place.
Anyway, Dr. Faraday keeps finding excuses to go out to Hundreds and they keep finding excuses to invite him out there, but strange things keep happening. Caroline’s dog, despite being the sweetest thing that ever lived, bites the face of a young girl when she’s visiting the house with her family for a dinner party. The dog has never done anything of the sort and Caroline and her mother are convinced the dog must have been provoked, but the family of the now deformed young girl are determined to have the dog “destroyed”. They end up having Dr. Faraday put the dog to sleep.
But it turns out the dog’s uncharacteristic behavior isn’t the only odd thing that happened that night. Rod later tells Dr. Faraday he couldn’t make it to the party because he was being psychologically tortured by some sort of dark spirit. Things he knew he had put away would suddenly end up in the water bowl on his washstand. Then the mirror walked across the nightstand towards him until it fell on the floor. He finally told the dark spirit to leave him alone and it did, and he’s convinced that’s the moment when the dog bit the girl because whatever dark energy he had told to leave him had gone instead to torment the dog until a different tragedy had been caused.
Rod had told Dr. Faraday all this in the strictest confidence, but being a doctor, he can only assume that Rod is suffering from some delusion and needs professional help. Rod’s situation devolves into alcoholism (because who wouldn’t become an addict when being tormented by a poltergeist?) and finally one night his entire bedroom is lit on fire while he’s asleep in bed completely unconscious from all the alcohol he had consumed. Fortunately, Caroline, who sleeps directly above him, was awoken by something in the middle of the night, came to check on him, and was able to put out the fires before he was burned alive.
Dr. Faraday is convinced Rod must have set the fires himself, however accidentally – leaving a cigarette burning, a lamp, something. Caroline notices that there wasn’t just one source of flame. It was as if various parts of the room spontaneously combusted, but Dr. Faraday remains adamant that there must be a rational explanation for it all.
As for Rod, that’s the last straw. He’s sent off to a mental hospital, but things don’t get better from there. Odd things continue to happen around the house and Dr. Faraday continues to find (or at least to insist that there must be) a rational explanation for it all. They find writings on the walls hidden all over the house, but it won’t come off no matter how much the maid scrubs. Everyone (except Dr. Faraday) says it’s as if it’s come up from the wall itself, rather than getting painted onto the wall.
Mrs. Ayres becomes convinced she’s being haunted by the spirit of her oldest daughter who died as a child. When Dr. Faraday finds cuts and bruises all over her, he assumes she’s hurting herself, and he doesn’t listen when Mr. Ayres says her daughter “isn’t always kind” because she’s so eager for her mother to join her in the afterlife. What baffled me was that Dr. Faraday continued to deny that anything paranormal could possibly be going on, even as he watched a spot of blood appear on Mrs. Ayres’s chest and soak throw her dress. He didn’t see her hands go near the spot, but assumes there must be a blade or something hidden that caused the injury.
Later that night Mrs. Ayres hangs herself, but since it happens “off screen” the reader is left to wonder whether it’s truly suicide or whether she was murdered by whatever is haunting the house.
In the midst of all this chaos, Dr. Faraday is growing closer to Caroline and eventually ends up engaged to her, but she calls it off after her mother dies. Dr. Faraday refuses to accept this, and honestly, his behavior in this part of the book was really disturbing, but eventually he got over it. Caroline accuses him of being more in love with the house than with her, and I’m not sure she’s wrong.
Meanwhile, Caroline is packing up the house, getting ready to sell it so she can leave and live somewhere in peace, but the house isn’t done with her. Dr. Faraday gets word that she fell from the upper landing of the house and was killed as soon as she hit the marble floor below. It’s ruled a suicide, but come on, we all know that isn’t the case, don’t we?
The trial goes over the height of the staircase (about three feet tall, making it highly unlikely she would accidentally tumble over it), and Dr. Faraday keeps remembering how “sturdy” and sure footed she was, how well she knew her way around that house. Not to mention that Betty testified that when Caroline fell, her arms were flailing in the manner of someone who fell or had been pushed, not straight at her sides in the manner of someone who had jumped.
The only witness to the murder was poor Betty who got up in the middle of the night because she heard footsteps and thought she might be wanted (they had to disable the servants’ bells because they couldn’t stop them from ringing on their own). She heard Caroline say just one word before her fatal fall: “You.”
Does it get any more cryptic than that?
Honestly, I found the whole thing kind of disappointing. I like a ghost story where we get to at least see the ghost, and preferably find out their identity and maybe even their backstory, but we got none of that in this book. Instead Caroline posits that it’s the house itself that’s tormenting them and that it targets each person’s weaknesses: for her, it was her dog; for Rod, it was the estate and the sad state of affairs their finances had become; and for her mom it was her dead child.
But if it’s an amorphous dark energy, rather than the spirit of a once-living person, why now? Why don’t they have stories of odd things happening around the house when they were growing up?
Like I said, the death of the aristocracy is definitely a factor in this ghost story, so perhaps it’s just the house’s way of protesting its own decay. Maybe it perceived Caroline’s attempt to leave as the final straw, which is why it killed her.