This House Will Feed
This historical horror novel opens in gripping manner: The taste of my brother’s flesh still haunted me. The tone is scarcely sensationalistic given the real-life horror of An Gorta Mór – the Irish Potato Famine. Maggie O’Shaughnessy, last surviving member of her family, languishes in the workhouse. The mysterious Lady Catherine offers salvation: “If the wrath of God and the British Crown weren’t determined to wipe this country and her people off the map, what is it you would want?” Maggie will impersonate Lady Catherine’s dead, heiress daughter so she can retain possession of Browne House; in return, Maggie shall have land and the vengeance she craves. Upon arrival, the House feels wrong – from locked attic to cagey servants to the incense wafting through its halls. The House wants something, and Maggie may not be the first lured into providing it.
The plot, absorbing within a well-crafted gothic setting, has deadly secrets and Irish folkloric bogeymen. The havoc Maggie’s naivete wreaks upon her family (tenants reliant on the goodwill of their English landowner) unspools in flashback, increasing tension. Alongside the supernatural horror are historical quotes – from politicians, newspapermen, et al. – ranging from callous to diabolical. An English economist, 1848: “he feared the famine… would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.” Landed English sought the minimum of Irish tenants necessary to yield profit, property taxes being assessed by number of crofts rather than acreage. The economist need not have feared. Ireland’s population halved – over four million lost to death and involuntary emigration, the Irish forced to ship goods and food to England while they starved in the hedgerows. This propulsive novel’s chills nestle amongst the deeper themes of class, culture, and heritage. This is the bifold horror captured: the supernatural and the all-too-human.
