{"id":7177,"date":"2026-09-01T04:49:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T04:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7177"},"modified":"2026-09-01T04:49:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T04:49:50","slug":"solace-house-by-will-maclean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7177","title":{"rendered":"Solace House by Will Maclean"},"content":{"rendered":"

From a third-floor window, a nineteen-year-old watches his hall of residence empty out for the summer. Parents arrive in small cars, tearful or embarrassed or both. The rugby captain is folded into a clergyman father\u2019s Saab, wearing the face of a man being arrested. The New Age anarcho-collectivist becomes Nicola again and packs a Mini in silence with her librarian mother. Everyone leaves, taking with them the personalities they spent a year trying on. By nightfall Alex Lane counts the lit windows in a building meant for hundreds and finds exactly one other. Solace House by Will Maclean<\/strong> spends five hundred pages earning that image back.<\/p>\n

It is worth noticing what that opening is not. It is not a ghost. And it is a boy realising he is watching something end.<\/p>\n

Solace House Is Really About 1993<\/h2>\n

The plot is a good one. Eight students take a paid summer job clearing a former sanatorium and, beyond it, the mansion of a dead recluse who spent sixty years filling fifty rooms with rubbish until only two crawl-channels remained. They find his paintings, his encrypted journals, three padlocked doors and a room lined floor to ceiling with mirror. There is a cipher hidden in his poetry that unpacks four times over into a confession.<\/p>\n

All of that is expertly done. But the thing the novel keeps returning to, in a way that has nothing to do with horror, is that it is the summer of 1993.<\/p>\n

The detail is exact and unshowy: batteries that die in a radio mid-track, a jazz-funk compilation bought only because a girl mentioned liking it, a supermarket branded with dinosaurs for Jurassic Park<\/em>, John Major, a copy of Who\u2019s Who<\/em> that reveals a classmate\u2019s father is a multi-millionaire. Nobody explains anything to the reader. It is simply how the world was.<\/p>\n

And then there is Leo, the archaeology student, sitting by a bonfire, high, telling the others what the rest of the decade holds. A rising tide of feminism and ecological consciousness. A redistribution of wealth. A green planetary awareness. Even the rock bands are becoming gentle, he says. The nineties will be characterised by kindness, and this will define not just the decade but the coming millennium. Clive, drunk, calls it the sixties repackaged for the ecstasy generation and says it will not happen.<\/p>\n

Nobody at that fire is in a position to know who is right. The reader is. Solace House by Will Maclean<\/strong> was written between 2020 and 2025, and it is impossible to read that scene from here without something cold going down the spine. This is a horror novel with a haunted house in it, but the passage that lingers is a kid confidently predicting a future that did not arrive.<\/p>\n

Two Explanations, and the Refusal to Pick One<\/h2>\n

The real formal achievement of Solace House by Will Maclean<\/strong> is that it runs two complete readings side by side and declines to arbitrate.<\/p>\n

In one, the house is what Edwin Flayne believed it was: a thin place, unmoored from time by a ritual he began and lost his nerve over, capable of sliding sideways into a version of reality where it survives whatever is done to it. In the other, everything has an unglamorous clinical name \u2014 hallucinogens<\/a>, a head injury, the confabulations a damaged brain builds to make an unbearable fact bearable. Every uncanny event has an exact psychiatric twin. A song that was recorded by the wrong band. Berries on trees that turn out to have none. A person nobody else remembers.<\/p>\n

What makes this work rather than infuriate is that the book takes the ordinary explanation seriously. The neurologist who eventually offers it is not a fool or a villain; she is patient, competent and almost certainly correct, and the narrator\u2019s certainty that she is wrong is exactly what a person in his condition would feel. Maclean lets both accounts stand at full strength to the last page.<\/p>\n

He also, crucially, has an image for it. The novel keeps returning to Richard Dadd\u2019s The Fairy Feller\u2019s Master-Stroke<\/em>, a small canvas swarming with impossible detail, painted over years inside an asylum by a man who had murdered his father. Is it a masterpiece or a symptom? Nobody has ever satisfactorily answered that either, and the question is the same shape.<\/p>\n

Where Solace House by Will Maclean<\/strong> gives way:<\/p>\n

The first two hundred pages test the patience.<\/strong> The sanatorium is cleared at something close to real time before anyone reaches the house.
\nThe narrator withholds badly.<\/strong> A running joke where he answers questions about his dead parents with the biographies of fictional orphans is funny twice, then becomes obvious scaffolding for keeping his backstory offstage.
\nHelen, the devout one, is a punchbag<\/strong> for both the group and the narration, and the book withholds any inner life from her until she has been damaged enough to deserve sympathy.
\nElla exists mainly as a reaction the narrator has<\/strong>, is very good company for two hundred pages, and is then removed.
\nThe antagonist\u2019s final actions belong to a slasher<\/strong>, not to the careful, ambiguous novel around them.<\/p>\n

Readers who want another house that behaves like an argument rather than a setting should go to Starling House<\/a> by Alix E. Harrow; those after the same species of English dread in a period setting will find it in House of Splinters<\/a> by Laura Purcell. Anyone who finishes Solace House by Will Maclean<\/strong> should also read the author\u2019s first novel, The Apparition Phase<\/em>, which is shorter, meaner and shares its taste for suburban unease.<\/p>\n

After the Last Page<\/h2>\n

Leo spends the book insisting that Neolithic spirals carved into rock are not decoration but diagrams of a human life: the outer ring is childhood, where time is slow and existence feels like a straight road; the rings tighten as the years accelerate; and at the centre there is not a full stop but a hole, leading somewhere the flat surface of the carving cannot depict. It is exactly the kind of thing a stoned twenty-year-old says at three in the morning. It is also, in this novel, the load-bearing idea.<\/p>\n

Because that is what the year 1993 is doing here. It is the outer ring. It is the last stretch where the road still looks straight \u2014 where everyone at the fire is nineteen, and the future is a rumour, and the worst thing that has happened to any of them is still ahead. Whatever else Solace House by Will Maclean<\/strong> is doing with its mirrors and its ciphers and its Mad God, it is fundamentally a five-hundred-page act of looking back at a summer from a very long way down the spiral.<\/p>\n

It is too long, and its villain is cruder than the book deserves. It is also the most formally ambitious British horror novel of the year, and the only one in recent memory to hide a working cipher inside itself, publish it in plain sight on every chapter opening, and wait for somebody to notice. Whether Flayne was a visionary or simply a very unwell man who was left alone for sixty years is a question Solace House by Will Maclean<\/strong> never answers. Neither, it turns out, does the poem.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From a third-floor window, a nineteen-year-old watches his hall of residence empty out for the summer. Parents arrive in small cars, tearful or embarrassed or both. The rugby captain is folded into a clergyman father\u2019s Saab, wearing the face of a man being arrested. The New Age anarcho-collectivist becomes Nicola again and packs a Mini […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}