On Saturday, In a Land are holding the first session of their book club, Sweating Blood. I can’t go because I’m hiking that day, but I read their first choice of book, Solace House, and here are my thoughts.
At the end of the university year, Alex doesn’t move out of his halls of residence. In response, the university offers him a job working with some other students to clear an old hospital. Alex joins a varied cast of characters who are then reassigned to clearing Solace House, a mansion that has been entirely filled with trash. Everyone is aware that there’s something wrong with this place.
In a recent Xanaduum newsletter, Grant Morrison described Solace House as “another of those things I stumble across more often these days where the writer appears to have been reading me and Alan Moore when he was younger”. And there are definitely a lot of tropes that I love from graphic novels – it reminded me in particular of Gideon Falls. The publishers compared it to The Secret History, which was a poor comparison – the only resonance was that both books are set at universities.
Solace House absorbs a lot of influences without being distorted by them – there is cosmic horror, gnosticism, labyrinths and fairyland. Julian Jaynes’ bicameral theory makes an appearance. There are hints at the Mandela effect, as something seems fundamentally misaligned with the book’s universe.
It’s strange reading books set in the 90s, as my memories of the time often clash with the writing. For example, there are phrases that I think were not common at the time (would we really have talked about dopamine then?). And I can’t see Bill Hicks being a cultural touchstone beyond a small group of aficionados – almost nobody had heard of him back then. Quibbles aside (would a student recognise a font as Antiqua Double?), this is a good book.
Solace House finds various ways to build dread, including the use of metafiction to undermine the characters’ grip on reality. The strangeness of their location suggests that they might have entered a story – that lost phone, ringing somewhere in a cluttered house, is almost too perfect. They know that their experiences are like a story – at one point, someone says “‘I believe it was Anton Chekhov who said that if you introduce a shedload of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Act One, you have to do them all by the end of Act Three at the latest.’”
The sense of unreality is used brilliantly when Alex makes a trip to a supermarket. The items he sees are described in the same poetic listings as used for the house: “Earth’s dwindling, irreplaceable rainforests and wild places, one way or another, packed up into cans and packets.”
This was entertaining and genuinely creepy at times – I made my way through it in a couple of days. There was a great running joke about literary orphans and an interesting puzzle. While not all of this worked for me, I was definitely entertained.