A ghost story set in Sussex (featuring an authentic haunted house…) – plus top selling author Q&A
- Book: The House on Cold Hill
- Location: Sussex
- Author: Peter James
The House on Cold Hill is a scary and very exciting read from an author best known for his Roy Grace detective series (You Are Dead is currently top of the Sunday Times best sellers list). The first 5 pages set a scene, which then comes to a dramatic and unexpected ending. The final 3 pages show how the story carries on after the events in the book. And the intervening 301 pages chronicle the just over two weeks that the Harcourt family lives in Cold Hill House… Oliver Harcourt, his wife Caroline, and their 12 year old daughter, Jade move from their town house in Brighton to Cold Hill, in the country a few miles away. Oliver is setting up his own web development business, Caroline is a successful solicitor, and Jade is at school. The House has been neglected and, as they soon discover, has a story to tell. Not only is the work they are required to do to restore it much more than they had envisaged (and budgeted for…), but it is also haunted. It soon becomes clear that they are sharing the house with an elderly lady dressed in blue… Initially the sightings are fairly innocuous, but they soon become malevolent. Ceilings collapse in the night, taps are mysteriously turned on and flood the house, a bed rotates 180 degrees (in a space not big enough to permit this). The electrics fail. Further investigation discovers anomalies in the geography of the house – windows can be seen from outside, but there are no matching rooms on the inside. As they extend their search, the Harcourts discover the terrifying history of the House – and wonder whether they will ever escape its clutches.
So far, a pretty conventional ghost story – complete with cold draughts and cats bolting out of doors… But what really, for me, makes the story so good is the way that James brings it bang up to date. The sinister goings on are modernised… Pictures appear and disappear on iPhones, scary text messages come through with no warning, emails are sent that could potentially destroy Oliver’s budding business. It is all, actually, pretty believable… Time also becomes warped which adds to the sense of things being ‘out of control’. Oliver sees his daughter and a friend playing by the pond in the garden at a time when they are out at a riding lesson – and then sees them again in exactly the same place doing exactly the same things after they have returned. The vicar calls to discuss the haunting, and then re-appears again ten minutes later to have exactly the same conversation. Towards the end of the book, Oliver goes into the village and finds it very unfamiliar – it is only later that we discover he has experienced it as it will be two years later, with new shops and the pub replaced by a bistro… It’s as though the certainties in life have moved out of kilter…
The House on Cold Hill really is a great and very spooky twist on a conventional ghost story. I thoroughly recommend it.
This review first appeared on our blog where we are pleased to feature an author QA with Peter James
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