It has all the hallmarks of a classic haunted house novel. A mother and her young daughter arrive at a dwelling by a swollen river in the pouring rain. The house itself looks like a “listing boat… the chimney perched at a wild angle. Rust bloomed like moss. Ivy garlanding everything.” Soon they begin a game of hide-and-seek. Ada is hiding from her six year-old, Pepper. In the cupboard, her leg touches someone else’s and there’s a whispered adult voice…
But for all the chills that this scene provokes, Lucy Wood isn’t encroaching onStephen King territory in her atmospheric debut novel. Instead, she fashions something quieter, slower and all the more memorable for it. Not least because Wood’s command of language and imagery verges on the sensational. The rural setting has a beauty – herons merge with wet stones, crushed grass and mist – but it’s incredibly hard-won. January skies are like “dusty slate”. The landscape blurs and thickens to wet grey. The pub serves food boiled into a gluey paste. Someone sends their meal back.
Ada knows this place – it’s where she grew up with her mother, Pearl. Now she must scatter her mother’s ashes and renovate the house to sell it – probably to some second-homer looking for a seemingly idyllic rural retreat. In one sense, then, Weathering is a ghost story, but it feels more concrete than that. Anyone who catches themselves talking to a dead relative in the midst of grief – perhaps even feeling their presence – will find much to love here.
And yet Wood never trips into sentimentality, just as there isn’t any great drama when Pearl’s “ghost” meanders into the textured narrative. She’s just a presence, unnerving yet comforting, at the heart of a beautiful book about family, history and nature.
