Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Starling House, Alix E. Harrow (Tor 978-1-25079-905-0, $28.99, 320pp, hc) October 2023.

Alix E. Harrow is also acutely aware of the traditions behind Starling House, as evidenced by her epigraph from Wuthering Heights and a few passages – including the opening line – that sound like they might have come from du Maurier’s Rebecca. But Harrow’s narrator, a 26-year-old dropout named Opal, has a tough, witty, hardscrabble voice that would hardly be recognized by traditional Gothic heroines, and her setting is the equally hardscrabble town of Eden, Kentucky, hanging on long after the coal mines that sustained it have played out. In the first few chapters, the author who unexpectedly popped into mind has nothing at all to do with haunted houses or the Southern Gothic tone of the rest of the book: Barbara Ehrenreich, whose famous accounts of the American underclass seem reflected in Opal’s desperate poverty and her dreams of providing a better life for her gifted but asthmatic younger brother Jasper. With her mother long deceased and her father a complete mystery, she works a part-time job a four-mile walk (she can’t afford a car) from the cheap motel where she and her brother are permitted to live, ostensibly because of a bet her mother made prior to her death. ‘‘People like me have to make two lists: what they need and what they want’’, she tells us. ‘‘You keep the first list, if you’re smart, and you burn the second one.’’ These dire circumstances provide a thoroughly credible motivation for Opal’s eventual involve­ment with Starling House, the crumbling man­sion on the edge of town which – of course – is shunned by all the locals.

Opal has dreamed about the house since childhood, and was fascinated by a 19th-century children’s fantasy called The Underland, the only work by Eleanor Starling, who had inher­ited the house under suspicious circumstances after marrying into the coal-wealthy Gravely family, and subsequently disappeared into it. Stopping by the gates of the house on her way home from work, Opal meets the reclusive cur­rent heir, Arthur Starling. As the point of view shifts between Opal’s first-person narration and Arthur’s third-person, we learn that Arthur views himself as fulfilling a kind of sacred mis­sion to be the last ‘‘Warden’’ of the house–but the house seems to have its own notions about that. Meanwhile, Opal grows so persistent that Arthur eventually offers her a job as a house­cleaner. As Opal develops her own relationship with the house – which, we soon learn, not only has a mind of its own but is prone to some seri­ous mood swings – her story inevitably grows entwined with Arthur’s, with the town’s dark history, with her own family background, and even with the secrets of that old children’s book The Underland.

Opal and Arthur are a far cry from Heathcliff and Cathy, just as Kentucky coal country is a far cry from the Yorkshire moors, but sense of place is a strength of Harrow’s fiction, and the town of Eden provides a kind of real-world grounding rare in traditionally claustrophobic haunted house tales. Opal’s fierce devotion to her brother Jasper gives her a clear focus in the world outside Starling House, and a subplot involving her only real allies in town, the local librarian and the owner of the motel where she lives, folds into the main narrative in neat and satisfying ways. Starling House may seem like quite a departure from Harrow’s expansive The Ten Thousand Doors of January, the historical detail of The Once and Future Witches, or her recent lively fairy tale redactions, but there’s a certain kind of sharply intelligent, defiant, and resourceful voice, usually belonging to a young woman facing daunting odds, that gives her fiction a consistent and consistently appealing tone. Opal may be the most appealing such fig­ure yet, and her story is genuinely haunting in a way that has little to do with ghosts or demons.

This review and more like it in the September 2023 issue of Locus.

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