House of Windows
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For the last few years, Veronica Croydon has been at the center of scandal, first as the younger woman for whom her famous professor left his wife, and then as the apparent widow of that man. When a writer staying at the same vacation home as Veronica has the chance to hear her story, he jumps at it. What follows takes him to the dark heart of a father's troubled relationship with his only son, in a story that stretches from a college town in the Hudson Valley to the battlefields on Afghanistan, from post-9/11 America to the height of Victorian England. It is a story that leads inexorably to the Belvedere House, the home Veronica shares with her husband, within whose walls a father's terrible words to his son echo and gain in awful force.
With nods to Peter Straub, H.P. Lovecraft, and Charles Dickens, House of Windows is a tense, frightening exploration of a marriage under strain from forces psychological and supernatural, a meditation on the ways loss haunts every one of us.
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The feel of John Langan's long, detailed, narratively driven Horror novel is very Lovecraftian. Veronica Croydon's tale, she being the younger member of the May/December marriage between herself and the missing professor Roger Croydon, reminds one of a Lovecraft story in which the narrator relates a horrific event or situation that happened to a friend or colleague (or in this case husband) that the narrator witnessed and took part in. Like in Lovecraft stories, the reader is given a glimpse into another, almost indescribably dark reality or dimension that the character(s) have unfortunately opened a way into. Langan doesn't rush the reader through Veronica's tale of her husband's disappearance, but slowly lets the horror build with all its many faceted details. A short excerpt from the book gives you some idea of what I'm talking about. “I had more information than I knew what to do with. Alcoholic painter-shamans; magic formulae for bringing houses to some kind of weird life; malevolent entities offering sinister deals; ghosts trapped who knew where by paternal curses; strange visions and sensations; and, to cap it all off, a spirit map; I wasn't living one horror story; I was the screaming heroine in a B-movie marathon.” The reader must me patient because Veronica has a lot of ground to cover, but it's a long, strange trip well worth travelling to its final dark destination.
