PASSING THROUGH VEILS

In Harrison’s latest horror novel, a woman with a history of mental illness is haunted by a crime committed in her new house.

Kathryn Fields has just bought a run-down Victorian town house in Washington, D.C.’s, Georgetown neighborhood in the hopes of fixing it up. Her wealthy mother thinks Kathryn has made a rash decision purchasing the property, which has ties to a 35-year-old  murder from 1984. Kathryn, however, hopes the house will anchor her following a psychotic break she experienced several months ago. “The things it must have seen and heard in its hundred plus years,” she thinks on her first night in her new home, “the intrigues and passions that must have seeped into these walls, embalmed beneath successive  coats of paint and varnish, recorded in the scars on the flooring, preserved in the smells of its woodwork.” The house contains more than just abstractions, she soon learns; it turns out there’s a secret dressing area with a marble-topped vanity hidden behind the wall of her bedroom. Why would someone do such a thing? Perhaps it has something to do with the antique box Kathryn finds there, containing a torn photograph of a beautiful woman—and a loaded handgun. Soon she’s seeing and hearing things that seem related to the unsolved murder of someone who once lived in the house. But are these things real, or evidence that Kathryn’s psychosis has returned? Harrison is adept at creating a sense of true creepiness, as when Kathryn discovers that someone’s rearranged her possessions and has an unexpected reaction: “All the furniture had been moved. The whole house had been rearranged. And yet as Kathryn stood there  stunned and disbelieving, the place looked right. Everything exactly where it should have been in the first place.” Several elements of the story will be familiar to horror fans, since they’re relatively common trappings of the haunted house subgenre. In Harrison’s hands, however, they feel like a fresh homage rather than a rerun. Many readers will find it a perfect book for a spooky late-night read.

A well-crafted, goose bump–inducing work of psychological horror.