Fuller...is a master of propulsive action, making the ground spin as each unreliable narrator takes center stage. Every measured sentence...builds on itself with the crumbling estate providing the saturated backdrop for this ultimately macabre tale. A distracting plot element or two notwithstanding, Fuller’s tale offers a gripping and unsettling look at the ugly side of extreme need and the desperate measures taken in the name of love.
Fuller, a skilled stylist, is very good at letting you get to know Frances by degrees and at describing a setting in which the ordinary rules of life feel suspended. She conveys the exoticism of a temporary new home and the eroticism of a temporary new attachment ... She keeps the suspense at such a low simmer—as if Anita Brookner had decided to try her hand at a potboiler—that you might be forgiven for wondering if, at times, the flame has gone out altogether ... Too much of Bitter Orange consists of two interesting, dramatic people doling out selective information to their undramatic listener; even as the noose tightens (and it does), you sense you could still slip out of it. It’s a tribute to Fuller’s abilities that even when her plot feels slight, the atmosphere she conjures creates its own choking sense of dread.
Bitter Orange explores the stories we invent in order to bear enormous pain or guilt. Fuller, who is also an artist, can be tremendously subtle, and our perception can spin on a single, dissonant detail: a stray hair on a pillow, a noise beneath the bath. Vivid visual images also build an oppressive, off-kilter atmosphere ... This sort of thing is so good that it makes the standard gothic tropes—a dead bird, a mausoleum, a ghostly face at an attic window—feel heavy-handed. The denouement slinks close to melodrama, and therefore feels slightly disappointing. But the real interest lies in the fascinating gaps and contradictions, the complexity of the characters and the thematic richness.
Fuller is impressive on physical detail, even when her story becomes a little crowded with subplot (a mysterious pregnancy, hints of the supernatural, sexual dysfunction, a hidden treasure trove and even the Beatles in Dublin all make appearances). Her description of Frances processing down a rickety spiral staircase for her first dinner with Peter and Cara, rigged out in her mother’s appallingly unyielding foundation garments and what sounds like a full-on ballgown, is agonisingly well realized ... She also has a talent for the sinister ... In some respects, the pudding can feel overegged; although not unexplored territory, the relationship of a single woman to a couple whom she idealizes and feels drawn to as a unit, rather than as two individuals, is rich enough to make additional devices and embellishment unnecessary ... These are small caveats, for Fuller is an accomplished and serious writer who has the ability to implant interesting psychological dimensions into plotty, pacy narratives.
... all the ingredients of a classic gothic novel. It is clear from the start that Bitter Orange cannot end well ... stories like this do not happen to plain people in ugly old houses. Fuller, however, always keeps one step ahead of the reader’s expectations, and she creates her atmosphere of simmering menace with all the assurance and imagination of a latter-day Daphne du Maurier.
Bitter Orange twists and bends, arouses and agitates, like a seductive nightmare. A demented memory play — Atonement by way of The Little Stranger ... Claire Fuller (Swimming Lessons) enhances the mystery with luscious detail ... The plot’s movements are rendered secondary, at least in the early going, to the atmosphere, and it’s to the novel’s benefit; with sensations so alive on the page, you’re constantly kept on your toes, attuned to the mania ... B+.
Fuller’s skill is in building up the detail and tension so that we want to know what happens, and why—and along the way we realize just how damaged Frances is. No spoilers, but there is a twist—and it isn’t one I saw coming ... Gradually Cara’s troubled history becomes apparent, and truth, fiction and the supernatural seem to merge. Fuller expertly builds suspense through Frances’s eyes—most tellingly through disturbing details of the dilapidated grand house with a macabre edge ... Bitter Orange is a smart creation from a skilled writer: a heady psychological novel that builds its layers carefully to allow gradual revelations and stomach-churning surprises. It is a predictable formula, but no less enjoyable for that, and a perfect summer read.
...finely crafted ... Formula and genre can themselves be as suffocating as a coffin, but in such capable hands they become freeing, reinvigorated, and compelling ... By the time Bitter Orange reaches its bitter, bloody end, readers will be turning the pages with delicious trepidation. We are in Turn of the Screw territory here, unsure whether what happens is real or imagined, true or false, light or dark ... The novel balances its intense relationships with touches of the supernatural, and the writing percolates insidiously.
She seems to have fun with the twisty plot, creaky mansions and moments of Gothic, horror-like excess ... Bitter Orange reads like an assured, old-school, du Maurieresque classic. It’s an atmospheric page-turner that speeds us towards a bloody climax of shocks and surprises.
Atmospheric and intoxicating, Bitter Orange is a slow-burn mystery/horror novel that cannot soon be forgotten. Hot, sticky and sexy, Frances's first-person narration eroticizes even the most mundane interactions with Peter and Cara. Fuller's prose shines as she hovers over the palpable small pleasures, detailing the taste of a cigarette, a flash of bare skin. Nevertheless, she keeps sight of the novel's larger plot, which occasionally and abruptly erupts from a languid summer haze. While the premise feels familiar, it is this very familiarity that gives the book its sense of the uncanny ... Exquisitely written and carefully paced, Bitter Orange imbues the dis-ease and sickening sweetness of old-fashioned literary horror with a new, modern flare.
Fuller’s...latest novel is seductive on the outside, but hidden within is a sinister story that considers the terrifying lengths people will go to escape their pasts ... In the vein of Shirley Jackson’s bone-chilling The Haunting of Hill House, Fuller’s disturbing novel will entrap readers in its twisty narrative, leaving them to reckon with what is real and what is unreal. An intoxicating, unsettling masterpiece.
Fuller’s brooding latest...is set in one of those decaying British mansions tailor-made for a story of dysfunctional relationships ... Cannily releasing clues on the way to an explosive finale, Fuller moves fluidly between the time of the story and a period 20 years later, when Frances is lying in a hospital and close to death. The lush setting and remarkable characters make for an immersive mystery.
