Burning House

The Burning House by Neil Spring

Delighted to find this Neil Spring novel on Netgalley, having enjoyed The Watchers and Ghost Hunters. Spring writes a good variety of fiction related to the unexplained and even better, he's from South Wales 😉.

I didn't realise until the end that he had taken the story of the real Boleskin House and weaved the story around it. Boleskin sounds an absolutely fascinating place, owned by Alistair Crowley and Jimmy Page and reputedly incredibly haunted and the site of some odd rituals and occurrences. Spring explains in a footnote that a mysterious fire did really happen, do unfortunately you can't exactly visit the real place.

The story is a fantastic mix of the paranormal and a psychological thriller. Clara is working as an estate agent trying to escape her tragic past by living in a small Scottish village on the edge of Loch Ness. In the course of her job she accidentally kills a man which is witnessed by a stranger, a man who had an unusual interest in the creepy dilapidated Boleskin house and is extremely into mind control and the rituals Crowley performed at the site.

The plot is skillfully woven around three main characters, and is gripping enough that I didn't want to put it down. Clara is a great character, and I thought that Spring did a good job with the mysterious stranger and Karl, Clara's abusive ex. The descriptions of Boleskin house are also very good. This is a shocking, sometimes gruesome but very well researched book and I highly recommend it.

I really wanted to love this. Don't get me wrong, its not bad but nowhere near the standard of his previous books. I found the Clara Oswald nod to Dr Who really distracting every time those names appeared on the page I found myself uttering the words “run... you clever boy”. Completely a fault of mine and not the book. If you are starting out with Neil Spring read Watchers first.