House of Windows

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.”

Tedious. That’s the first word that comes to mind with this book.I would have put it down about a fifth of the way into it but I stuck it out, mostly because some writers I know of have spoken of Langan highly and I wanted to see why. I wanted very much to like this book. I always respect attempts at the more literary side of horror fiction, but while I can appreciate the attempt here, the book just didn’t succeed.The final quarter of the book was somewhat more interesting, with a few more original angles in its horror action, enough for me to give it a third star I’m not sure it quite deserves, but even then it was never all that interesting.I feel like the book makes a number of key mistakes. First, the story is told mostly as summary and flashback, which meant that the action was already in the past. The book read often as much like a summary of events as a dramatization of events. The story is told mainly in the first person voice, from two narrative perspectives, but the main narrator/ character wasn’t especially interesting and there wasn’t much of importance created by the first person point of view, although it did give the author the chance to let both narrators make numerous boring side comments that the book could have done without.I appreciated that the author wanted to create complex characters, but ultimately they weren’t that complex or interesting. The slipstream concept of combining literary with horror fiction is an idea that in theory I like a lot, but the goal of much literary fiction is to make readers care about the characters. The dull academic world family drama (and I’m not opposed to books that reference university environments, but you have to do something worthwhile with it) in this book never stopped being dull even when the horror elements finally finally finally kicked in.The author loves Dickens, but Langan seems mostly to have taken from Dickens the idea that a book should be long. But Dickens fills his books with huge portraits of many aspects of his culture, whereas this book had endless pages about boring upper middle class people whose high self-regard and dull opinions just kept on filling page after page.Ultimately, this is one of those books that to me sounded great in hearing about it, but was very disappointing to read.

Surreal haunted house story with a heavy reliance on the works of Charles Dickens who haunts the story throughout. Nothing here is easy to explain but as a basic outline; there's a haunted house, three lost souls and what appears to be a family curse. This particular haunted house is far from usual and meticulously linked into the story through the revelations of Veronica whose husband, Roger, has disappeared and whose stepson, Ted, has died. What follows is a close study of relationships, love, loss and the horror we do to ourselves and to one another. There are some truly chilling supernatural elements throughout the story but what plays out mostly is a heavy reliance on fantasy in the style of Lovecraft rather than contemporary horror. 'House of Windows' should appeal to fans of Poe, William Hope, M R James and, of course, Charles Dickens and though dark and surreal I found the story slow and hard to follow in parts. Enough intrigue to keep me reading until the end and 'House of Windows' is certainly an intelligent, thought provoking tale.

After reading and enjoying “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies” I popped every book I could find by John Langan into my wish list, waiting for that happy day when these would become available in downloadable form.And yay! along came “House of Windows” which, although a ghost story, not only looks at the toxic tensions that can grow between fathers and sons, or describes realistically how people can react irrationally in circumstances of grief and loss, but it also examines the strains that a mismatched couple might feel when frightening and inexplicable events occur inside their home.But I was disappointed at how lacklustre this book was when compared to The Wide, Carnivorous Sky. I happily read along until around the halfway mark when a rather steep downturn into descriptive tedium took place and things just didn’t pick up again, not even towards the end. There are only three main characters here and our narrator, the younger wife of a much older man, goes into endless detail about various irrelevancies until I thought I’d scream, yet I waded through dissertations on marriage and relationships and past histories and other dreary, extraneous padding until I lost the plot completely.Characters walk from room to room, or have showers, or order food to take out, or go up and down stairs, or ponder this, that and the other…all of which took from the story’s momentum. There was also a rather long narrative thread involving research into their house which seemed to peter out and just become forgotten. At least, I couldn’t find any relevance in this thread with what eventually happens in the story.The climax comes before the book has fully run its course but, with still about 10% to go, my last drop of curiosity had evaporated and I just gave up. I couldn’t interest myself in what became of the narrator, her husband or his son.But look, who’s perfect? This is a first novel – and its several years old - and John Langan can certainly write, so despite this negative review I’ll retain his stuff in my wish list and I’ll still buy Mr Gaunt and The Fisherman whenever they show up in Kindle form.

Belvedere House è una grande e signorile abitazione, ma è anche molto più di quanto occhio umano riesca a percepire. È un luogo reale e non, è lo spazio interiore di una colpa e di una maledizione. È lo specchio del difficile rapporto tra un padre e un figlio e il luogo da dove si sviluppa la mappa metafisica che stabilisce l’esatta posizione della morte del giovane. È il nodo focale in cui si intersecano i diversi piani del passato e del presente, del qui e dell’altrove. John Langan, attraverso il racconto che sgorga come un fiume in piena dalle labbra di Veronica Croydon – personaggio splendido, profondo e reale – scrive un romanzo complesso e ricchissimo, che ruota intorno a un unico evento, fusione di reale e soprannaturale, che scava nei numerosi aspetti delle complicate relazioni umane. Lo consiglio vivamente!

This is a clunky, downright amateurishly-written book. Someone teach Langan that old adage "show, don't tell". While they're at it, perhaps they can rap him on the knuckles for all the times he shoehorns mini-reviews of famous writers and their books into his narrator's mouth. The effect is unrealistic, as much so as the narrative device of having one character tell the entire story in the first person. Endless exposition, self-obsessed asides, and fluff aplenty; for all the literary references Langan needlessly shoves into his story, his writing ironically is lacking in all literary aspiration.

A great read! Having said that, I like anything by John Langan 🙂