Reviewed by Barbara Roden

“Aren’t you afraid?” asks Caroline Ayres, late in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger. “Afraid of what?” replies the narrator, Dr. Faraday. “Of the Ayres family taint,” replies Caroline. By this point the author has long since established that there is something at the Ayres family home, Hundreds Hall, of which to be frightened; and it’s a measure of the author’s considerable skill that when Caroline poses the question, the “family taint” takes it place alongside ghosts, poltergeists, astral projection, and the Hall itself as yet one more terrifyingly plausible explanation for the mysterious events at Hundreds.

We get our first glimpse of two-hundred-year old Hundreds Hall in the summer of 1919, when the gracious Georgian house and its inhabitants, the Ayres family, have not yet begun their inexorable slide towards decay and insolvency. The Ayreses are still “big people” in the district, and the narrator, Faraday, is an awe-struck ten-year-old visiting the grounds for the Empire Day fête, only able to slip inside the house because his mother used to work there as a nursery-maid. He is allowed to accompany one of the maids into the upper reaches of the house, but only if he stays behind the curtain separating the servants’ stairs from the main house. This Farady cannot do; he sneaks a few feet out into the corridor and, impressed by the grandeur of his surroundings, breaks off a piece of decorative moulding as a souvenir.

Thirty-eight years later, in 1947, Faraday visits the house once more. He is now a doctor, but is as awkwardly placed between two worlds as he was when he ventured out from behind the curtain: his professional status distances him from the working-class world in which he grew up, but those roots prevent his acceptance by the gentry. When he is called to Hundreds it is to treat Betty, the recently employed fourteen-year-old housemaid, who is complaining of stomach pains. Faraday realizes she is shamming, and at first suspects homesickness, or a too-heavy workload, for Betty is one of only two servants in the house, and the only one who lives in. However, the girl finally admits that it is the house itself which is troubling her: “There’s so many corners, and you don’t know what’s round ‘em. I think I shall die of fright sometimes!”

Thus begins Faraday’s acquaintance with Hundreds Hall–which is crumbling to pieces–and the Ayres family, no longer “big people”: Mrs. Ayres, graceful and charming, a throwback to a more elegant age; daughter Caroline, twenty-six, plain and unmarried, doing what she can to make up for the lack of servants; and son Roderick, twenty-four, injured in the War and trying desperately to keep the estate afloat. As Faraday becomes a regular visitor to Hundreds, he retains the fascination with the Hall he had as a child, and finds himself simultaneously attracted to, and repelled by, the Ayres family. While capable of great charm, they refuse to realize that their time, and that of Hundreds (at least as the Ayres family has always known it), has come and gone, and cling instead to notions of class and entitlement which are fast disappearing in post-War Britain. Gyp, the family dog, is treated more kindly than is Betty; and it is Gyp who inadvertently sets in motion a chain of events which has devastating consequences for the Ayres family, Faraday, and Hundreds Hall itself.

But is this incident really the start? By the time it happens Betty has already talked about the house giving her “the creeps” and mentioned the “horrible dreams” she’s been having, and on one of Faraday’s visits Caroline off-handedly mentions the mess in Roderick’s room, and how he doesn’t allow Betty in to tidy. “I can’t keep her out!” Rod complains. “And she moves things around where I can’t find them, and then pretends she hasn’t touched them.” Alert readers, noting the presence of a pubescent girl in the house, will immediately think “Poltergeist!”, and subsequent events seem to bear that theory out. But Waters is far too intelligent a writer to tip her hand so early, and so plainly. Just when it seems certain the evidence is pointing one way, a character will reveal some new piece of information–about themselves, or Hundreds, or another person–and suddenly everything seems to point to another cause. Roderick suffered a mental breakdown after the War; is he imagining things? Even after he leaves the house, is he able to project something of himself back into it, and control events? Mrs. Ayres is still mourning the death of her first-born daughter, Susan, more than three decades earlier. Is the girl’s ghost haunting the house? Caroline is described by one observer as having got “the thick end of things”, kept at home until the War gave her some freedom, only to be dragged back to look after her brother and mother; is her subconscious resentment of the situation stirring something up within the house? Is Hundreds Hall itself an evil entity, preying on those within it? Did Faraday’s trivial act of minor vandalism, so many years earlier, cause something in the Hall to snap, and does he have more impact on events than he can ever realize?

All of these possibilities are evoked in the course of that rare thing, a ghost story at novel length which never seems forced, or overstays its welcome. Waters begins in leisurely fashion, masterfully evoking the world of post-War Britain in all its uncertainty and fading glory, and allows herself a good deal of room in which to develop character, atmosphere, and setting, all the while turning the screw with increasing ferocity until the tension is almost unbearable, never more so than when Mrs. Ayres finds herself visiting the long-abandoned nurseries on the topmost floor of Hundreds Hall. The Little Stranger is an assured, atmospheric, and thoughtful ghost story, terrifying both for what it depicts, and even more for what it leaves unsaid.