House of Windows Paperback – July 11, 2017

House of Windows (2009; reprinted in 2017 with an Introduction by writer Adam Nevill with Acknowledgements and an Afterword by the author; 358 pp.) is John Langan’s first novel (his second published novel, The Fisherman, is a superb work; 2016) and is likely to be one of the most unusual and captivating novels of a haunting one will encounter. It is simply brilliant; a novel of the supernatural for the thinking reader.In the author’s new Acknowledgements Langan writes of House of Windows, “the genre people weren’t happy with all of the literary stuff, the literary people weren’t happy with all the genre stuff.”To begin with Belvedere House is not a typical haunted house. It has a “striking, even peculiar structure,” but otherwise appears quite benign— “nothing about the house’s past… suggested a former inhabitant hanging around.” There are “no secret passages, no corpses sealed up in the walls, no Indian burial ground in the basement.” Yet, Belvedere House does have its quirks as Veronica Croydon, the book’s primary narrator, becomes increasingly aware in “a series of events that didn’t fit the available models of supernatural evidence.”More than the house, the couple in it, are at the true heart of the story: Veronica and her considerably older, sixty-five-year-old husband Roger Croydon, a professor in the English department at SUNY University in Huguenot where they first meet when Veronica is one of Roger’s students. At the beginning of House of Windows, Roger has long been missing and Veronica reluctantly admits to a stranger, a writer to whom she is finally telling her story, Roger has been dead for two years. Veronica has never told her story to any one because she doesn’t believe she will be believed; “…its impossible. What happened to Roger is impossible.” She also fears she will be considered “in deep psychological trouble.” Convinced to finally tell her story, Veronica does so, and her narrative makes up the great majority of the novel and is also a large part of the brilliance of House of Windows.It is through Veronica’s stream of consciousness-like narration readers get their first glimpse of true horror. Roger and his son Ted, never close as the boy has grown up, have an explosive confrontation in which an enraged Ted confronts his father for leaving his first wife (Ted’s mother), ending “a thirty-eight-year marriage” “for some teenaged slut.” As the confrontation escalates, Roger disowns his own son in the harshest of language. Following the hate-filled encounter from which neither father nor son reach any kind of absolution, within a short period of time Ted is dead—killed in Kabul, Afghanistan, in an ambush.Veronica’s narrative of her life with Roger at Belvedere House is both riveting and unconventional. As she relates her husband’s increasingly peculiar behavior, his sleepwalking, his self-inflicted isolation, and above all his growing obsession with his dead son there is also the “weirdness” that settles upon them in the house—mostly upon Veronica. Page after page of narration takes place without Veronica pausing without any ordinary interruptions as would happen in a discourse such as hers—not even for a glass of wine—which readers discover along with a myriad of other details—Veronica likes. She inserts questions into her story to her “confessor,” but readers hear no responses or acknowledgements he might utter. It is as if Veronica is talking out loud to herself. Veronica and the unraveling of her story in minutia is the book’s sole focus for most of its entirety. Veronica does recount conversations with Roger and others as she recounts events all of which are pertinent to the story and make Veronica’s story and her disposition even more realistic.At times Veronica’s narration is repetitive and not always in perfectly chronological order which also makes her testimony true to life while also allowing for emphasis to be placed on important details and incidents and their specific impact upon Veronica. She is a young woman who, in a sense, is in desperate need of answers as Belvedere House slides “from bad to worse” and she faces the increasing trauma she experiences not only having to do with Roger, but his dead son.Because of Langan’s carefully wrought language and the book’s flow of events as well as the narrator Langan employs, if a reader finds life intruding upon their reading, even for days, the reader can resume where they left off reading and be immediately plunged back into the plot of House of Windows as if they never had closed the book. It is also because of the virtuosity of Langan’s technique that House of Windows builds in suspense and wonderment.Throughout House of Windows there are numerous allusions to literature and great writers of the past. Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and to a lesser extent Henry James are often in the fore along with a few modern writers as are several poets—most of whom Veronica and Roger cannot reach a consensus regarding the quality and importance of the poets’ work. As the novel progresses, the presence of Dickens, in particular, begins to take on greater and greater meaning. In what appears at first glance to be a tangent Veronica explores having to do with the builder of Belvedere House and an acquaintance of his, H. P. Lovecraft appears to cast a slight but recognizable shadow over the novel as well.House of Windows takes on a greater sense of nightmarishness as Veronica’s fear, despair, mental, physical, and emotional strain, as well as eventually her desperation increases. Her fear derives from an increasing supernatural presence as well as human frailties causing irrevocable consequences and her powerlessness to make things better.It isn’t until near the end of House of Windows that Veronica’s listener gets to interject questions and for a brief spell assumes the duties of the book’s narrator. It is in this portion of the novel that the devastating tragedy which befalls Veronica and Roger Croydon becomes most appreciable and heart-rendering. Even so, an air of mystery swirls about events as Veronica can only speculate upon Roger’s final fate—a speculation which remains true to Langan’s intellectual and morally complex vision of the novel and his “knotty, damaged characters” (see the author’s Afterword) since Veronica produces more than one possibility of what really happens at the end—unaware of the truth herself—leaving the author she has spent an entire evening with and the reader in wonder and with the realization there are some dark places the human mind can never penetrate. To try to fathom the darkness can only lead to madness itself.Although not for the impatient reader or those who insist their horror drips with blood and gore on nearly every page, House of Windows is for the reader who wishes to be captivated by a provocative piece of writing and House of Windows is engrossing from beginning to end. As author Adam Nevill states in his Introduction to House of Windows: “… readers who appreciate quality horror, appreciate having their imaginations and horizons stretched while witnessing just what can be done with horror fiction, will find a favourite writer in John Langan.”

Young second wife Veronica Croydon has lost her Dickens-specialist much older husband Roger. Academic friends speculate as to his disappearance. Finally, at a house party in Cape Cod Veronica tells the framework narrator, a writer of horror fiction, the story of what she believes happened.John Langan’s novel House of Windows is suffused with Dickens. But as our writer listens to Veronica’s tale, I cannot help but think of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner who “stoppeth one of three” (our writer is accompanied by his wife and son). Like the Mariner, Veronica is compelled to tell her story. Like the wedding guest, the writer is compelled to listen.Is Veronica one of the infamous “unreliable narrators”? She may be. Once could make a case that she is unhinged. She seems to be an attractive young woman, intelligent, and one believes that Roger would have fallen in love with her. But there is an edge to her. From her voice, you can understand why some in the circle of friends might distrust her. That voice is one of Langan’s finest creations in this remarkable work.There is a haunted house. There a haunted person (but the person who one might think would be most haunted seems oblivious to the hauntings). There is a curse.That curse, when I got to it, struck me as being one of the most horrendous in all literature. I think only Shakespeare could have equaled it. I’m not sure he ever topped it. I wonder if Langan had trouble writing it, or if possibly it leapt into his mind like a kick from an angry god.The book was originally published in 2009. Why didn’t I read it then? It would definitely seem like my kind of book. Well, thank goodness it finally became available on Kindle, for I can no longer read the printed book.But already it was on my Amazon wishlist when Langan’s next book, The Fisherman, was published. That one I got to first (using my Kindle) and adored. I found out via Facebook that a Kindle version of House of Windows would be available in the summer of 2017. The day it was available I ordered it and began reading.No, it is not, for my taste, quite as wonderful as The Fisherman. I wish that I had read it first. But it was not a disappointment. And I found fascinating echoes between the two works. With these two novels Langan has moved to the forefront of the short list of great writers of fictions that might involve horror. Trust me: they involve much more than that.Why only 4 stars? Well, Langan is still very much alive and still writing, and I save that 5th star for those no longer with us. I hope it is a long time before Langan gets my 5th star!