Rawblood

"It’s so multi-layered, I’d need 10,000 words to describe it. I can say that, once you’re in it, the atmosphere completely envelops you, and it begins to feel like a classic that you have already lived. So it’s not confusing at all. I don’t know how she did it. It’s incredible—it was her debut. So, Rawblood is told by different narrators through different timelines, spanning from the early Victorian era up until 1910 or so. It is centred on this 11-year-old girl, Iris, who lives on an isolated estate known as Rawblood. Here are Gothic themes: the big, crumbling house—which is on Dartmoor, in this case—and for generations, the family has been haunted by a curse, which is: if you love or marry, ‘She’ comes. And that means a violent early death for everybody involved. So this girl grows up under the control of her manipulative father, who uses the curse to control her. As she matures, she begins to question the history she has been told, and the nature of the supernatural haunting. It’s told through fragmented memories and unreliable narration. There are shifting timelines. And it creates the sense of increasing dread that is incredibly resolved at the end. I won’t give it away. It’s an insanely ambitious story for a debut. The structure and plot is designed like a fine clock, and it has all the best Gothic elements of Victorian literature—although the way it is written is so modern, so psychological. Her writing is just so good. I’m in awe. All of her novels are incredible. Her most popular is probably Last House on Needless Street . But Rawblood is especially dear to my heart. She’s very good at exploring how stories can be used to control people. I can’t recommend her enough."