In This City, Where It Rains by Lyndsey Croal
I would like to thank Luna Press Publishing for an advance copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Luna Press Publishing
Published – Out Now
Price – 10.66 paperback £3.99 ebook
In This City, Where it Rains is a gothic horror novella set in an alternative version of Edinburgh.
Maggie is haunted by ghosts that only appear in the rain - and it always rains in this city.
At the edge of town, stands Tair House - a house that remembers, in a city that forgets. The mansion is so damned, it scares the clouds themselves from breaking, and the man of the house, Xavier Logan, and his wife Lucia, are harbouring a dark secret there - something that connects to Maggie and her ghosts.
Soon all roads lead to Tair House, where Maggie hopes only to uncover more about her family's past and her muddled memories.
But the house is hungry, and something is waking deep within its roots...something that has been waiting a long time for Maggie.
We are all occasionally haunted. Not I admit by spectres, phantoms and things that bump in the night but our pasts, our unanswered questions or our uncertain futures. Those things build on our minds and may indeed shape how we see life or the wider world just as much as some houses are said to change atmosphere once an apparition is detected. In Lyndsey Croal’s wonderful supernatural novella In This City, Where it Rains we meet a woman who can see troubling spirits, a world that indeed seems out of joint and a house that requires attention and, in the process, a compelling mystery is now to be solved.
Maggie works in a bar in the city every eternally raining night. She is very good at it but she is even better at seeing ghosts everywhere. They lurk on corners and in rooms and she has seen them since she was a young girl however much her late departed grandmother told her she cannot. She however gets alarmed when finally, one speaks to her and even manages to touch her. Just as things appear to be escalating in an unchanging city, she meets a young man using an obvious false name of Jack. She’s certain she has never met him before, but she feels like she recognises him. The two young people discover they have a few things in common but before things can be explained Jack’s father arrives on the scene and shows his disapproval but soon the father writes to Maggie inviting her to their home Tair House. A place that also Maggie feels she should know
This is a fascinating atmospheric mystery with a fine sense of the uncanny woven into Croal’s storytelling. Everything feels not quite right. An eternally raining city that we see the residents of feels often trapped in and unaware of anything outside the city. The ghosts that Maggie sees are less theatrical and more just figures on streets that the rain help make much more visible and their ordinariness and silence makes then perhaps even more alarming and yet with the scene where one finally speaks after we are told they cannot there is a sense of a story where the world is about to go through something at last. The big question is how does Maggie, the City and the residents of Tair House all fit together.
Croal mixes scenes with Maggie’s strange few days with scenes that see the past of Tair House from the perspective of the house itself and like a certain other House in fiction it has its own agenda. Croal skilfully weaves the past and present together so we as the reader see the connections Maggie is only just discovering but we are just as much as in the dark as to how the house needs Maggie. The escalating sense of strangeness moves when she arrives in Tair House leading to a very dark and often creepy finale where revelations about everyone are finally shared. Its handled very well and at the heart is we have characters not just haunted by ghosts but by their missing pasts, their mistakes and their losses. These guide the character’s actions for good and ill and so the final confrontations leave us uncertain which way the story can go and indeed no one gets out unharmed in some way. However, the key message is to move on we have to face these things, even be changed by them just to perhaps see a different world one more time.
I found this a wonderfully told story that captures the reader very quickly and we work hard to seed the clues that the reader needs to put the mystery together and still leaves us having to read the final pages to understand it all. The language and atmosphere really make this a perfect tale to read on a chilly dark evening and wonder exactly did that shadow in the corner of your eye just move? Strongly recommended!
